A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Financial Argumentative Essays

This report is based on the author's C-E translation practice for CF40 Monthly Newsletter.In the practice,the source texts are financial argumentative essays which have both features of financial texts and argumentative essays.In financial texts,technical terms are often employed for its professional nature.And for its persuasiveness,argumentative essays should be as lucid as possible which can be attributed to unity,coherence and emphasis.However,since the source texts are transcribed from speeches,colloquial features are also evident in the texts which complicate the translation.An argumentation-centred approach for translation quality assessment proposed by Malcolm Williams incorporates argument schema and rhetoric topology.After tests and revision,Williams evolves the approach to two sets of parameters,core parameters(argument schema,arguments,conjunctions and inference indicators,and narrative strategy)and field-specific parameters(terminology,etc.).When the author compares her own version of translation and the revised version by senior translators,difficulties and problems in translation are identified and summarized under the guidance of parameters introduced by the approach.The problems are neglect of unity,misplacement of emphasis,inaccurate translation of conjunctions,subjectivity in narration,mistranslation of technical terms and inconsistency with typographic rules.Guided by the approach,the report also offers solutions.Before translation,the argument schema and the argument type should be outlined for unity and emphasis.In translation,conjunctions should be carefully rendered by means of retention,addition,omission or alteration.Depersonalization should be adopted through re-structuring or identity clarification.Technical terms should be identified and differentiated from synonyms and common usage according to the context.The typographic rules should be followed.In this report,an argument-centred approach is introduced,which enriches the theories available to assess translation quality.Based on the parameters introduced by the approach,problems are identified and solutions are proposed which can guide the translation practice.As for teaching,with the introduction of new parameters,students are equipped with tools to grasp the gist of texts and teachers have new parameters to assess students' translation quality.In addition to translation,since texts represent domestic experts' views and opinions on financial issues,the report can contribute to communication between experts at home and abroad and thus may help win the international community's support for China's financial reform.