A Report On The Translation Of Quarantine Stations At Ports Of Entry:Protecting The Public's Health(Chapter 3)

Published in 2006 by the National Academies Press,Quarantine Stations at Ports of Entry: Protecting the Public's Health is an investigation report submitted to the U.S.CDC by the Expert Committee of Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.To some extent,the translation of this book may draw public attention to frontier sanitary quarantine and guide people to protect the public's health.Chapter 3 “Today's CDC Quarantine Stations at U.S.Ports of Entry” has lots of organizational initialisms and terminologies related to quarantine,medicine,law,civil aviation,etc.It also uses many long sentences to express related concepts,which embodies the rigorous expression logic of scientific style.In addition,to clarify statutory responsibilities of officers and organizations,it quotes many articles of United States Code(U.S.C)and Code of Federal Regulations(CFR).Chapter 3 also implies certain cultural background knowledge which increases the difficulty of translation.Adopting case study method,this report summarizes translation skills with examples.This report consists of four parts: translation task description,process description,translation case analysis and summary.The first part begins with a brief introduction to source material,source-language authors and the significance of translation task.The translation process then follows,including preparation,translation difficulties and revision.Then it is the core part of the report with case analysis on lexis,syntax,background knowledge and style.In this part,the present author concludes that: a)Translators should have terminology awareness.Referring to national standard terminologies,the translator should mainly adopt literal translation and omission to translate terms.b)Translators should find the full name of initialism first,then according to the U.S.organization framework,literal translation or free translation is used.c)Long sentence translation methods proposed by Liu Miqing could be applied to the translation of long sentences in quarantine texts.d)Based on the principle of professionalism,translators should adopt literal translation methods to translate articles of law in quarantine texts.The last part is a reflection and summary of the translation practice,which may be useful to translators.