A Report On The Translation Of Safety Regulation For The Erection, Inspection, Use And Dismantlement Of Steel Scaffold

This paper is a translation report based on the author’s personal translation practice. The translation task is to translate a non-literary text entitled Safety Regulation for the Erection, Inspection, Use and Dismantlement of Steel Scaffold within five days. It is one of the author’s friends working as a professional translator that invited the author to cooperate with her to finish this task. It can be said that the author has hardly any knowledge about scaffold—the topic of the source text—before. In reviewing the literature, the author realized that parallel texts can be employed in the translation. As a consequence, after skimming through the source text, the author tried to learn about scaffold on her own and purposefully searched for relevant parallel texts at the same time. Fortunately, quite a few parallel texts were obtained, of which three were selected for reference after careful examination of the relevance and authority of the texts.The employment of parallel texts in the translation practice is reflected in four aspects:(1) translation of technical terms; (2) translation of definitions; (3) translation of difficult sentences including complicated sentences and sentences with no subjects; and (4) translation of tables. The source text is characterized by professional knowledge and numerous technical terms which constitute an obstacle for the author who is an outsider in this respect. Besides, satisfactory "equivalents" are usually not found in ordinary dictionaries. But parallel texts, where ready-made translations are often available, bring much convenience to the author. There is no need to look up the dictionary one by one and therefore time can be saved to a great extent. What is connected with terms is the translation of definitions which are also typically professional. And the translation may be "unprofessional" if the author just gives explanations of terms without using the professional vocabulary and the specific sentence pattern. In addition, there are so many sentences, long and complicated or without the subject, which is also a challenge for the author. Similar sentence structures, however, can be found in parallel texts. The last is about the translation of tables in which the content may also be very complicated and difficult to those unfamiliar with the field, and hence hard to translate. Taking advantage of parallel texts in a suitable way, however, not only time and effort can be saved, but the quality of translation can be guaranteed as well.There are altogether five chapters in this report. The first chapter gives a brief introduction of the content and nature of the source text and an analysis of possible difficulties in its translation. The second chapter is mainly on "parallel text" including the concept and the advantages of using parallel text in pragmatic translation. Relevant studies at home and abroad on parallel text are also briefly reviewed. The third chapter is the description of the task completing process, including pre-translating preparation, the selection and employment of parallel texts and the quality-ensuring measures. The fourth chapter is a case study. Concrete examples are given to illustrate the employment of parallel texts in the translation of technical terms, definitions, difficult sentences and tables. The last chapter is conclusion about gains and losses in the translation practice.