A Practice-based Research On Financial Translation From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Program is a professional credential offered by the CFA Institute to investment and financial professionals. In recent years, more and more Chinese candidates are taking the CFA exam. However, language becomes a barrier that hinders many of them from passing the exam.This thesis carries out a translation and research project on the CFA textbook. The author first excerpts some chapters on financial analysis as the source text and defines it as an informative text according to Peter Newmark’s Text Typology and employs the strategy of communicative translation. Based on the practice, the present thesis conducts a translation research through detailed case studies on lexical, syntactic and textual levels in order to tentatively propose several universal principles to guide future translations. Through all the case studies, the author finds out that lexically, financial terminologies and common words with uncommon meanings are worth special attention. To translate them accurately, multi-channel searching and repeated verifying are needed. Syntactically, long and difficult sentences can be translated into natural and smooth Chinese to secure readability and understandability by adopting such translation techniques as voice conversion and information restructuring. Textually, the stylistic features of being both a financial text and a textbook should be considered and reflected in the target text.