| With China’s opening up to the outside world, foreign economic activities are becoming more and more frequent, which results in a growing number of foreign enterprises concerned. Therefore, translation of documents of foreign enterprises like daily management rules and regulations and operating instructions for employees is on the increase day by day. The quality of the translation is crucial to daily management rules and regulations, effective application of the new technology and employees’ life safety.This report was about a Chinese-to-English translation project about Operating Instructions Manual for Employees of Nantong Yahua Shipbuilding Co.,Ltd in2012. The translation project involved altogether more than60,000Chinese characters of which the author translated more than10,000. Three steps were taken in the translation project:pre-translation preparations, case studies and post-translation reflections. The preparations included the parallel texts learning, which mainly discussed the necessity of parallel texts learning and steps of parallel texts learning; personnel assignment; requirements for translators concerned, including requirements of grasp the whole text, application of technical tools, and translators’strong sense of responsibility and team spirit; analysis of the source text in terms of text type and language style, and specification of the translation principles of "faithfulness" and "expressiveness". Case studies mainly included the choice of diction, like choice of the highest-frequency words and the context-dependent words, in order to choose the optimal technical words; omission; amplification:combination and target text tone-setting. The post-translation reflections included reflections on the professional qualities of a translator, which involved translators’adequate professional knowledge, good command of English and Chinese and strong sense of responsibility; and the limitations of this manual translation, mainly including no uniform translation style and no application of the computer-assisted translation software. |
