An Analysis Of Ec Translation Errors Of Non-literary Text

This report attempts to classify and analyze the translation errors made in the translation project of The Story of Naxos,a book written by Nicolas Soames.Naxos,a recording label founded by a German businessman Klaus Heymann in Hong Kong in 1987,completely changed the general style set by the major labels and won the trust and love of consumers with low-price and high-quality products.The Story of Naxos was originally published in English in May 2012.In the book,the author describes the establishment and development of Naxos,as well as artists who played an indispensable role in this process.The whole book consists of 18 chapters,the translation of which was finished by a team of six members.I was responsible for translating the first and ninth chapters of the book.The first chapter records the impact of Naxos’ foundation on the recording industry at that time,while the ninth chapter introduces some outstanding musicians who made significant contributions to the development of Naxos.This practice report tries to systematically count and analyze the errors met in the translation process.In the preparatory work,the translation error category criteria constituted by American Translator Association(ATA)for the translation certification test held by itself was chosen.ATA classified all translation errors to 24 categories,basically containing all the errors possibly appearing in the translation process,which can be seen as one of the most authoritative criteria in the world.Then,the text was divided by sentences to mark error categories.Because same errors or different types of errors may appear in the same sentence,I gathered statistics about the number of sentence with errors,the total number of errors and the number and ratio of all kinds of error,thus reflecting the ability and performance of the translator in the translation.There are total 10 types of errors found in the translation project.Data analysis showed that the most common error type in this project turned out to be the misunderstanding of the original text,accounting for 58% of all errors,followed by the omission error,accounting for 18%.Eight other types were identified,which fall in the categories of addition,ambiguity,cohesion,faithfulness,terminology,other,syntax and usage.Then,different types of errors were analyzed in the case analysis part,followed with some appropriate solutions.This study developed a complete set of error markers and statistical analysis method,in the hope of helping translators to analyze their own translation,and to find out errors and make targeted corrections.The study also found that the causes of translation errors mostly fall into two categories: understanding and expression,that is,the ability to understand the original text and the ability to express in target language.Furthermore,the report also discussed the problems occurred in using ATA error classification standard in English-Chinese translation.