A Technical Communication Approach To The E-C Translation Of Traffic & Driving Law From Community Law Manual 2019-20

Though technical translation takes up a major part of the current world’s total translation output,it has long been regarded as the ugly duckling of translation,especially in the academic circles.It is obvious that people have not realized its importance to translation study,therefore studying the translation methods of technical documents is of practical significance.The source text selected is based on the chapter Traffic & Driving Law from an online resource Community Law Manual 2019-20 published on the website of New Zealand Community Law(NZCL).The selected chapter focuses on popularizing traffic legal knowledge and guiding readers to solve legal problems.The project was conducted under the guidance of technical communication by adopting translation skills and other non-translation processes to improve the readability and usability of the target text.The project focused on user analysis,which as a result reflected what the target readers expect from the target text and further decided the linguistic style and translation strategies.To better perform communicative functions,measures of excellence in technical documents were introduced to guide the choice of particular translation skills,and post-translation editing and page design were paid special attention to.The translator has adopted the following strategies and principles to achieve the goal: 1)appropriately and flexibly expressing the professional contents besides using the correct translation of terminologies,jargonization of common words and neologisms;2)properly using the expressions and syntax common in technical documents,such as imperatives and the third person;3)effectively helping the target users understand contents and improve user experience,such as less use of passive voice to conform to the Chinese habit of expression with less use of passive voice,adopt iconic linkage as a cognitive strategy to minimize readers’ memory load and develop parallelisms to highlight key points;and 4)applying design principles and focusing on the visual effectiveness of the target text,in addition to restructuring and layout design to level up the text from “usable” to“easy-to-use”.