A Report On The Translation Of Polaris Tool Design Guide

With the increasing development of medical technology in modern society,higher requirements are put forward to medical instruments.There is more and more cooperation in China and beyond to make the medical instruments much more precise and efficient.However,many technical files or instructions are written in English,and these texts can't be well understood by all the target readers.To enhance the accessibility,a Shanghai-based company commissioned me to translate Polaris Tool Design Guide into Chinese.The report is based on the author's translation of Polaris Tool Design Guide which mainly introduces points and precautions in design,construction,validating and testing as well as characterization of medical tools used with the Polaris vision measurement systems.According to the text typology,the main function of language classifies texts into six types.The informative texts are concerned with any topic of knowledge and focus on external situation,the facts of a topic,reality outside language.The purpose of the guide is to render information about tool design to target readers,so it is an informative text of English for Science and Technology.The design guide covers mainly three subjects:computer vision,electronics and medical equipment.Thus,it has many specialized terms,imperative sentences,and long sentences with complex structures.With those features,the translation and research of the source text has certain reference value for the translations of similar texts.As a guide for the design of medical tools,the translation material of this report is highly specialized,which brings many difficulties to the understanding of the source text and to the accuracy and authenticity of the translation output.What's more,due to the existence of many specialized terms,long sentences with complex structures and imperative sentences,how to make the translation of specialized terms accurate and easy to understand,how to translate long English sentences into authentic Chinese sentences and how to make the imperative sentence maintain the original tone,all these are other difficulties in the translation.For this translation task,the client requires that the translation not only should accurately convey the original information and realize communication purposes,but also be concise and easy to understand.Communicative translation focuses on information transmission,pays more attention to the understanding and reaction of the target text readers.During the research of text typology and translation theory as well as his teaching practices,Newmark held that communicative translation theory is most applicable to the informative text.Therefore,according to the textual features and the client's requirements,the author adopted Peter Newmark's communicative translation theory to guide the translation of the source text,and explores how to solve the above difficulties and problems encountered in the translation.Firstly,the translator compares and verifies the translations of the specialized terms through dictionaries and online resources after fully understanding the source text,and finalized in parallel texts.Secondly,the translation of long sentences is mainly based on the method of dividing the sentences into small sense groups in the source text and reorganizing these sense groups in the target text to ensure that the translation conforms to the Chinese expression habits.Finally,the translation of the imperative sentence uses a strategy that preserves effects and tones of the original imperative sentence.In addition to analyzing the difficulties and solving methods in the translation task,this report also talks about how to finalizing the target text through reviewing and proofreading to ensure and improve the quality of the translation.At the end of the report,the author shares some reflections and solutions received during the translation and hopes that they could offer some references to other translators.