A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Post Instructions Of Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway

This thesis is based on the translation practice during the author's internship in Chengdu Linguistic Services Company.The author was responsible for part of the Chinese-English translation of “Post Instructions of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway”,including the post instructions for passenger station personnel,chief train conductor and ticket clerks.Based on Newmark's classification of text type,the post instruction is a combination of informative and vocative text with two textual functions that need to be achieved in the TT,namely,informative and vocative functions.That is to say,the TT aims to deliver the original information accurately and help the railway staff operates accordingly.Newmark proposes that informative text and vocative text are suitable for communicative translation strategy,which focuses on the target readers and the achievement of textual functions.Therefore,with the help of communicative translation strategy,this thesis aims to explore the specific and feasible translation methods to solve the problems encountered during the translation process so as to improve the translation quality.Guided by the communicative translation strategy,in order to achieve two textual functions in the TT mentioned above,the author adopted various translation methods to solve the problems encountered in the translation at lexical,syntactic and discourse level.At the lexical level,there are many phrases with Chinese characteristics in the ST,including compressed phrases and verbal ones.As the former one has no corresponding translations in the target language,the author made clear of their original meanings before adopting the method of literal translation with annotation.For the latter one,nominalization was used to make the TT clear and concise.At the syntactic level,the problems lie in the zero-subject and long sentences.In order to highlight the key information in the TT instead of the doer,the passive voice was adopted for the translation of common zero-subject sentences.To achieve the vocative function in the TT,English imperative sentences were used for the instructional zero-subject sentences.In addition,there are also a lot of long sentences in the post instruction for chief train conductor.The author first analyzed the meaning groups of the ST and then adopted the combination and division properly to make the TT simple and easy to the target readers.At the discourse level,the author used the methods of ellipsis and substitution to deal with the semantic repetitions in the ST to make the TT simple and fluent.Besides,to enhance the cohesion and coherence within the discourse,various junctions were added to make the TT more idiomatic and acceptable for the target readers.In conclusion,through the analysis and summary of the author's translation practice,this thesis expounds that Newmark's classification of text type and communicative translation strategy proves significant in guiding the translation of post instructions,providing some reference for future translation of similar projects.