A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Phnom Penh Municipal Solid Waste Management Project(Instructions To Bidders)

With the rapid development of economic globalization,China is getting more closely integrated with the world.In recent years,the “Belt and Road” initiative,being actively implemented by the government,has also given China more opportunities to contract international projects,which has increased the market’s demand for the translation of tenders and bids.The source text is excerpted from Phnom Penh Municipal Solid Waste Management Project(Section 1),which is an Invitation for Bids.It belongs to an informative text.The IFB and Bidding Document have been prepared to assist Bidders in making their own evaluation of the service agreements for Solid Waste Collection and Transportation covering three(3)designated zones of Phnom Penh(the Contracts)through a fair,transparent and competitive bidding process in accordance with the Laws of Cambodia and international best practice.During the translation process,the author analyzes the characteristics of this bidding document.Difficulties of this translation task lie in the translation of special terms,polysemy and nominalization at lexical level as well as the translation of passive voice sentences and long sentences at syntactic level.To address the above translation difficulties,the translator adopts the following methods.Taking Peter Newmark’s translation theory as the guide and combining with specific translation examples in translation practice materials,the translator summarizes and analyzes how to deal with lexical and syntactic problems through two translation methods which are semantic translation and communicative translation in the actual translation process of the international bidding document.In addition,with reference to Newmark’s classification of language functions and text types,the translator can determine the application of the above two methods in order to faithfully convey the information of the source text.Specifically,literal translation is applied under the guidance of semantic translation to translate special terms,whose literal meanings comply with the context.Free translation is used under the guidance of semantic translation to translate terms that do not correspond to the context.And free translation is also adopted under the guidance of semantic translation to deal with the polysemy so as to accurately transmit the connotations of the source text.Besides,taking communicative translation as the guide,the translator adopts the conversion to address the nominalization structure,which means converting the nouns in English into verbs in Chinese to achieve the fluency of the translation.At the syntactic level,the translator transforms the passive voice sentences in English into the active voice sentences in Chinese according to Newmark’s communicative translation.And the translator maintains the passive voice in English unchanged when they are translated into Chinese under the guidance of semantic translation so as to be faithful to the message of the source text.Considering the similarities and differences between the Chinese language and the English language,when faced with complex and long sentences,the translator uses sequencing and embedding according to the guidance of communicative translation to ensure the readability of the translation.By writing down the translation practice report,the translator can understand Newmark’s translation theory better,and have a further understanding of his translation methods of semantic translation and communicative translation.Besides,the translator also deeply realizes her shortcomings in language expression,and will continue to work hard to improve her bilingual conversion ability in the future.Moreover,it is hoped that she can better understand and summarize the problems and experiences in the translation of the Invitation for Bids for offering a reference for other translators in translating the bidding documents alike.