A Report On English Translation Of Long And Complicated Sentences In Mechanical Manual

This report details the author's experience in translating a 20,000-word mechanical manual.The target readers were technicians of non-English speaking countries.The report aims to explore the guidance of translation variation theory to this task.The translation variation theory advocates that translators should adopt various means to deal with the content and form of the original text flexibly,so as to ensure the best transmission of information.Typically,this involves methods such as adding,subtracting,editing,narrating,contracting,merging and modifying,which is a suitable approach for the guidance of the translation of scientific texts.In order to find suitable translation strategies,the author classified the long and complicated sentences of this manual into long sentences,sentences abounding with terms,and subjectless sentences according to the definition in the relevant literature and the textual features of the manual.Among the various translation strategies,the author chose three of them to translate for the purpose of this manual:subtracting,adding and modifying.The author used subtracting to split the long sentence and then rearrange the sentence order.In this way,the semantic coherence of the translated text would be guaranteed.Also known as "translation plus explanation" method,adding is necessary for translating sentences abounding with terms.Modifying,a method of "translation plus rewriting",is generally used in translating the subjectless sentences as the subject needs to be identified and restructured.This report introduces the translation task and process,and analyzes the textual features.The theoretical framework covering the translation variation theory and Chinese long and complicated sentences has been presented after the introduction.The author illustrates the application of the three translation strategies on long and complicated sentences contained in this manual.Finally the conclusion briefly indicates the significance and limitation of the study.The research provides detailed classifications and matching strategies for English translation of long and complicated sentences in mechanical texts.It is a positive attempt of mechanical text translation aiming at providing references and contributing to China's foreign trade and communication on mechanical fields.