A Report On Translation Task Of A Set Of Performance Indicators Across The Health And Aged Care System

The report is based on the English-Chinese translation task of a report entitled A Set of Performance Indicators Across the Health and Aged Care System,a medical report prepared by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for Health Ministers in June,2008.The original text,with a total of 40,000 words in English,was almost evenly divided and jointly translated by the translator and his co-translator,both working part time for the China National Health Development Research Center.The Chinese version of A Set of Performance Indicators Across the Health and Aged Care System is of value as it enables us to better understand the medical management system in Australia.The translator followed Eugene A.Nida's functional equivalence theory while completing this translation task.As Nida says,“Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message,first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style”(Nida,1993:118).Equivalence,as explained in Nida's theory of “functional equivalence”,includes lexical equivalence,syntactic equivalence,textual equivalence,and stylistic equivalence.This report analyzes lexical equivalence and syntactic equivalence in the translation task.At the lexical level,conversion,amplification and annotation are applied to achieve lexical equivalence and these translation methods are discussed.At the syntactic level,the sequence method,the reversed order method,and the integrated method are applied to translate long English sentences into Chinese so as to achieve syntactic equivalence.The report is composed of four parts.Chapter 1 deals with the background,purpose and significance of the task,as well as the related task requirements.Chapter 2 describes pre-translation work,including collection of terminology,reading parallel texts,and source text analysis.In Chapter 3,main challenges of the translation task and corresponding solutions are analyzed in detail by applying functional equivalence theory and CAT,and specially,six translation methods of words,phrases and long English sentences are exemplified,and table translation,format conversion and terminology rendering are explored.Chapter 4,the summary of the task,involves self-assessment,assessment from clients,and suggestions for future studies.The report concludes that functional equivalence theory is of practical value in terms of the English-Chinese rendering of words,phrases and long sentences,and that the application of CAT enhances translation quality and efficiency.This report,in a nutshell,can serve as a helpful reference to future translation of medical management documents..