| This paper is a translation project report on the translation of Material Safety Data Sheet. With the enhancement of globalization and development of Chinese economy, chemicals have become an indispensable part in transnational trades. Material Safety Data Sheet, a significant document for chemicals, has gradually become a hotspot in the translation area. However, most of the current researches have been focusing on terms and complex sentences; only a little research has been done on MSDS from perspectives of readers and clients. This paper will take MSDS as an example to discuss how translation will be influenced by clients, readers and terminologies in the light of Skopos theory.There are five parts in this paper:Chapter One is a brief introduction to the selected topic and technical translation. This chapter also rectifies some misunderstandings of technical translation; Chapter Two briefly summarizes the pre-translation preparation, including the translation theory applied and MSDS feature analysis. This chapter analyzes the linguistic features of MSDS from lexical and syntactic aspects; Chapter Three analyzes some examples from the text under the guide of Skopos theory. It discusses some impediments which the author met during the translation process from the perspective of clients, readers and terminologies and gives some solutions to these problems. Chapter Four briefly summarizes the self-review and proofread processes. Chapter Five serves as a summary to the whole translation project.According to this paper, translators should fully evaluate the purposes of the text and be aware of the potential readers before conducting translation. The target text should be reader-oriented and some forms of modification should be made if possible in order to facilitate comprehension. Meanwhile, translators should be aware of the gap between the source text and target readers and try to utilize multiple translation techniques to abridge this gap. |
