A Practice Report On C-E Translation Of Mechanical Patent Abstracts

The translator has begun the internship at Dezhou Cocreate Translation Service Co.LTD.since March 2019,and then received the tasks of translating patent abstracts.The translator translated lots of patent abstracts in different fields,and most of them are mechanical patent abstracts.For this reason,the translator summarizes practical experience in the Chinese-English translation of mechanical patent abstracts,hoping to provide reference and help for other translators engaged in the mechanical related fields.The mechanical patent abstracts,as typically informative texts,are specialized scientific and technical texts with distinctive stylistic features.According to the requirements of the Company and the customer,the translation of the patent abstracts focuses on accurately reproducing the contents of the source text.Therefore,the translator used the strategy of semantic translation as a priority to translate the mechanical patent abstracts.In addition,given that the target readers are foreign users,the translator also used the communicative translation as a secondary strategy.About 10,000-word mechanical patent abstracts are selected as a corpus for the analysis of this practice report from more than 200,000 words that have been translated,and some translation methods and skills are summarized from the analysis of 18 cases.This practice report consists of five parts.The first part is an introduction,which mainly introduces the tasks of translating mechanical patent abstracts and the purposes and significance of studying their English translation.The second part is the analysis of Chinese mechanical patent abstracts from their contents and features and the introduction of translation requirements.The third part is the description of the translation process,including preparation before translation,efforts during translation,and proofreading after translation.The fourth part is the analysis of some typical cases.Based on the semantic translation as a priority,some translation methods and skills are discussed from understanding,expressing,and revision.Understanding mainly refers to the understanding of the original text,including understanding the domain knowledge about machinery,as well as understanding multi-attributive names and synonyms in mechanical terms.Expressing focuses on“over-translation”,especially for category words,sentences without subjects and sentences with long attributives.In order to make the target text meet translation requirements,some skills of revision are also used,such as repeating core nouns,splitting sentences and addingconjunctions.In the fifth part,the gains of translating mechanical patent abstracts are summarized,the limitations of the translation are analyzed,and some suggestions are given to the translators engaged in related fields.