A Translation Report On A Global Study On Digital Capabilities(excerpt)from The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19,many activities within the global economy had to proceed via the web since March 2020,leading to increasing attention to the topic of digital capabilities of countries,government agencies,the private sector and citizens.As countries and various institutions shift to remote work and online services,upgrading digital capabilities has become an imperative.Against this backdrop,the author practices translation of excerpts from the World Bank Group’s 2021 report--A Global Study on Digital Capabilities.The report states that as the digital economy expands and countries develop digital maturity,more attention needs to be paid to a coherent digital transformation strategy,and that digital capabilities such as leadership,skills and culture are prerequisites for the success of any digital transformation strategy.This World Bank(WB)report contains a lot of economic jargons and can be categorized as an economic text.The report adopts a formal reporting style,so in this translation practice,in order to ensure that the translated text is consistent with the original style,the translator maintains a rigorous attitude,carefully searches for the terms in the original text and ensures that the translation is accurate and concise in terms of language.The translator selects relevance theory as the theoretical guide for this translation practice,analyzes the translated material at the lexical and syntactic levels,summarizes the problems encountered in the translation practice,and explores and discusses how the translator can make the reader obtain the best contextual effect by minimizing their processing effort with the help of the ostensive-inferential communication model.Translator analyzes the source text at the lexical and syntactic levels by means of ostensive stimulus or contextual extensions.For some specialized terms and vocabulary,the translator adopts annotation and word conversion in translating;while at the syntactic level,in order to improve the readability of sentences,the strategies of addition,omission,restructuring,sequence adjustment and ostentation are used,in an effort to make the translation closer to the reading habits of the target language readers,reduce their processing efforts and thus achieve optimal relevance.Through this translation practice,the author not only enriches her knowledge about digital capabilities,but also testifies that relevance theory has guiding and explanatory power for the translation of economic texts,and provides a reference experience for other translators to deal with similar translation problems arising from cognitive contextual differences.