On Comprehension And Choice Of Lexical Meanings

An annual report is a comprehensive report on a company’s marketing-and-services-oriented performance over the proceeding financial year. Typically, it includes the general corporate profile, balance sheet, consolidated financial statement and other information and is disclosed and filed with the SEC according to the rules. Hence, an annual report is of great value for shareholders and potential investors to get a true picture of the company’s business, the risks it faces, the operating and financial results and the developing visions.The source text of this report was drafted by Starbucks Corporation and was publicly available free of charge online. As one type of business texts, it is notable for the business features such as technical terms, business jargons as well as for its linguistic features of objectiveness, formality, accuracy and complexity of syntactic patterns.The American translation theorist Eugene A. Nida claims that “Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language, the closest nature equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning, and secondly in terms of style.”(Nida and Taber 1969:12) Word is the smallest unit of translation, so the choice of lexical meaning comes first and is also the most important in order to achieve the closest natural equivalence between the target language and the source language. And the lexical meaning of most languages embodies the properties of ambiguity, fuzziness and generality. If we cannot have a correct understanding of the sense of words and choose the right expression, then the original message conveyed in the source language cannot be retained and reproduced.This essay probes into the understanding and choice of word meaning from three perspectives, i.e. linguistic context, subject field and meaning extension with instantiations. And it holds that the accurate comprehension of lexical meaning and appropriate representation is the prerequisite to translation quality.