A Report On The C-E Translation Of Feasibility Study Report On Water Supply Project In Nakuru City Of The Republic Of Kenya(Excerpt)

This is the translation report of a Chinese to English translation.The translation task is assigned by a Research Institute of Investigation and Design of Water Conservancy and Hydropower.The author participated in the team as a translator and is responsible for the translation about 13,000 Chinese characters.The source text,mainly introducing the overview,construction scale and specific construction plan of Lake Nakuru,is a typical scientific and technical text.In the report,the author elaborates translation process,i.e.the collection of parallel texts and acquaintance of collaborative translation platform,term base and translation memory for the preparation;unification of terms and expressions and continuous communication among team members for the in-translation process and utilization of QA system,cross inspection,layout design and revision for the post-translation process.Communicative translation presented by translation theorist Peter Newmark is chosen as the guidance for the translation task.Newmark,based upon the previous studies on system-functional linguistics,put forward three text functions,namely expressive,informative and vocative functions.The strategies "semantic translation" and"communicative translation" are thus proposed according to the different types of text functions.According to Newmark,technical report is a typical "informative" text and communicative translation shall be adopted.The author specifies three aspects to be noticed and further analysis in the process of translation,namely parallel segments,sentences with ambiguity in expression and non-subject sentences.Typical cases are selected to further analyze,from the syntactic level,the specific translation strategies of the above three issues.According to communicative translation,we can add conjunction words and change sentence patterns for translating parallel segments.Revision of the original text through context or relative knowledge can be applied when translating sentences with ambiguity.What is more,adding formal subjects and changing the sentences into passive voice are proper for the translation of non-subject sentences.The author realizes from the translation task that in engineering translation,the translator requires not only the solid theoretical foundation to guide the specific translation,but also expertise in other field to facilitate better understanding of the original text.Meanwhile,computer-aided translation tools help to reduce trivial works for the process,thus improving the overall efficiency and reflecting the strong power of technology in practical translation.It is expected that the report would be of some assistance for translators engaging in similar translation.