Translation Report Of International Cooperation For The Development Of Space (Chapter2)

Space sector is the products of human’s broadening atmosphere and cosmic space. Having developed for about a hundred years, it has become one of the most active and influential fields of science and technology. The achievements gained in space sector mark the the degree of mankind’s civilization, and also reflect the level of the science and technology of a country. Plenty of space documents have emerged with the rapid development of space technologies. With the fast progress of our national economy, national defence as well as science and technology, space technologies have permeated into nearly every sector of society and have already become an ingredient of modern information society, and, in turn, every domain has urgent requirements of space technologies. The space sector has been attached great significance by the times, and therefore the translation of those relative documents has become increasingly important. Besides, the development of science and technology has a close relationship with the prosperity of literature materials. Thus, there is no doubt that the translation of space documents is of great importance for the progress of the space sector of China.This is an English-Chinese translation report of the second chapter, Broadening the Base Cooperation as a Springboard for New Participants in the Space Sector, of the text International Cooperation for the Development of Space which is a technological text given by my teacher as a translation project. The translation must be with accuracy and fluency, and the space terms in the text must be translated without mistakes.A large number of terms relevant to space sector are contained in the source text, which means that most words used here are formal and standardized. Besides, five main cooperative patterns of space sector between different countries in the past few years are introduced in the text in which quite a lot of professional terms and operation processes are involved. That is to say the source text is of great accuracy, objectivity, logicality, rigor as well as coherence. This means that the translation must be faithful to the content of the source text and at the same time reflect the stylistic characteristics of it, and the translator can not create anything not contained in the source text. Meanwhile, the source text, as a technological one, was written to spread knowledge of space sector, and this means the translation, while being faithful, must also be as fluent, flexible and coherent as possible to achieve this goal and be understood by the readers. Thus the degree of the faithfulness and the flexibility of the translation is the key point of the practice.This report is based on the Functional Equivalence theory proposed by Eugene Nida to discuss the approaches to the translation of technological texts. The Functional Equivalence theory requires the translator to translate the source language into the target language in the most proper and natural way and to reappear the information of the source language both semantically and stylistically. The application of Functional Equivalence theory to the translation practice of space documents can realize both rigorous translation that is faithful to the source text and fluent translation that is easy to be understood by readers, which is beneficial to the spread of technological knowledge.