A Report On The E-C Translation Of Exploring Heavy Vehicle Interaction(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Optimal Relevance

As an important means to realize the advanced “people-centered” design concept,human-machine interaction,the communication between human and machine via a user interface,is of great significance to China’s transformation from a major manufacturer to a major innovator.With the development of intelligent automobile and other products,technology of human-machine interaction has been widely applied in product design,but construction machinery sector is lacking in relevant research.Therefore,it is important for domestic construction machinery industry to obtain translated academic papers of scientific research on human-machine interaction.The source text of this translation report is excerpted from an English academic paper entitled Exploring Heavy Vehicle Interaction,which was first published in the 2020 M?lardalen University Press Dissertations.The part on how to use eye tracking to investigate the human-machine interaction of heavy machinery is selected as the translation material for the report.Representative words,sentences and texts are chosen for analysis to contribute to the completion of the report.Guided by relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson,the report regards translation as a double ostensive-inferential process of communication.Setting the three principles of relevance theory as goals: conformity to target language readers’ cognitive environment,optimal relevance between the source text and target text,and reducing target language readers’ processing effort,the translator discusses the translation techniques and methods through case analysis.On the lexical level,semantic extension of common words is prominent in Exploring Heavy Vehicle Interaction,i.e.some non-technical words present technical meanings in a particular context.Nominalization and abstract nouns are frequently used.In terms of syntax,attributive clauses,long attributes,past participle phrases acting as post attributives and other complicated structures are prevalent in the text.In respect of the textual level,the source text presents a clear structure.The author of the source text uses a variety of cohesive ties,such as reference,parallel structure,etc.,to ensure the coherence of the text in grammar,vocabulary and structure.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the translator selects appropriate contextual variants of sememes based on the specific context.In order to eliminate ambiguity,ostensive stimuli in the source text are adjusted through part of speech conversion and lexical amplification or omission.Optimal relevance in syntactic structures is achieved through sequential translation of coordinate structures,division of main and subordinate complex structures,and restructuring of various modifiers.To reduce the processing effort of target language readers to infer the author’s intentions correctly,the translator adopts the strategy of explicitating pronouns,repetition,etc.,to transform the demonstrative reference,reiteration of synonymy or hyponymy,etc.of the source text;the translator also carries over the structural cohesive tie-parallel structure into the target text and replaces the original first person subjects with impersonal subjects to make the textual register in line with the register requirement of academic papers.In addition to qualitative analysis,this report also applies corpus tools to obtain statistics of the source text and the translated text in terms of high-frequency words,mean sentence length,standard deviation of sentence length and conjunctions.Lancs Box is used to generate visualized diagrams of semantic collocation to clearly illustrate the context of target words.Combining qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,the report compares the statistics and discusses the reasons for the differences between the two texts in aforementioned aspects.Relevance theory has strong applicability and can well guide the translation of academic papers of science and technology.This report enriches the application of relevance theory in translation to some extent and provides reference for the translation research on academic papers of science and technology.However,due to factors such as time limit of the project and the translator’s ability,how well the target language readers will reflect on and receive the translation of Exploring Heavy Vehicle Interaction awaits further comments.