An E-C Translation Report On The Oxford Handbook Of Food,Politics And Society(Chapter Eight)

Close international exchange is the general trend in the world today.And economic exchanges require the world to promote exchanges in biotechnology.Food security is one of its concerns.It has deep implications for a nation's social harmony,political stability and sustainable economic development.Translations of biotech texts is sure to be one of the necessary channels.For the world,biotech translations provide all governments with a good reference to achieve the end of sharing resources and promoting food security.The translation of The Oxford Handbook of Food,Politics and Society,published by Oxford University Press in 2015,will serve the purpose.Chapter 8,“Alternative Paths to Food Security”,is selected as the source text of this translation project.The determination of the language and style of the source text is helpful in the following translating practice.The biotech text is rigorous and thorough,logical,concise,with strict sentence structure.The difficulties in biotech translation are the correct understanding of words and sentence structures,which should be the guarantee of correct and idiomatic expression of the translation.The report analyzes and discusses the corresponding translation strategies and solutions to these problems.It focuses on the case analysis.Detailed analyses are made of the translation examples from the perspectives of comprehension,expression and adaptation.Among them,comprehension is divided into two aspects: professional knowledge and linguistic knowledge;expression is divided into avoiding linguistic incoherence and avoiding translationese;adaptation is divided into making adjustments of word order and sentence order and adapting to Chinese expression habits.Through the case analysis,it was found that effective English-Chinese biotech translation require the translator to consult a lot of relevant background materials andparallel texts.Rich and sound linguistic and technical knowledge of the source text is absolutely necessary,and so is competent command of the native Chinese.It is hoped that the report may provide reference for those who want to be engaged in biotech translation and those who are currently engaged in biotech translation as well as those who would like to know the frontier of biotech and global food security.