Translation Practice Report On The Customer Research Project Of An Automobile Company

This practice report is based on the English translation of a customer satisfaction survey carried out by an overseas automobile enterprise.The survey was conducted as an interview.Its content can be divided into three parts,which take automobile interior decoration,automotive customization,and off-road performance as the theme respectively.Customer satisfaction survey can help enterprises to understand customers’ needs,their shortcomings as well as the differences between them and their competitors,thereby improving their service and products in a targeted manner.In recent years,customer satisfaction survey has been widely valued at home and abroad.Therefore,the translation of this text is meaningful to the company for it could provide a reference for them to improve their service and upgrade their products.As the source text is a transcript of an interview,its language is highly colloquial.During the process of translation,the difficulties the author encountered are mainly implicit words and expressions,incomplete sentences,and long and complex sentences.To solve these problems,the author had adopted variation translation methods.Variation translation is a theory put forward by translation theorist Huang Zhonglian.It is defined as a translation activity in which translators flexibly adopt various means to translate the source text based on the special needs of specific readers under specific conditions(Huang,2002b).Under the mechanism of this theory,seven translation methods are put forward for translators to use.The seven methods are amplification,subtraction,narration,combination,contraction,compilation and adaptation.Guided by variation translation theory,the report uses cases to present how five variation translation methods,apart from contraction and compilation,help the author complete the translation work.In addition to this,the report also summarizes the problems to be solved and the implications the author gained from this translation practice.It is expected that this report could provide a useful reference for translators to do customer survey translation in the automotive field.