A Report On The Translation Of Expository Texts Under The Guidance Of Toury’s Translation Norms

The expository text is widely used in daily society,and the study of its translation can promote the in-depth communication of economy,trade and culture between China and foreign countries.The research object of this translation practice report is the E-C translation of Circuit Breakers,ACB,Low Voltage,Electric Power,Air,Removable Construction,General Specification for published by the U.S.Department of the Navy in 2007.The source text is a typical specification which introduces the components,equipment requirements,working principles,tests and precautions of air circuit breakers in the United States with formal style,many clauses,complex sentence patterns,and professional vocabularies.The purpose of explanatory texts is to introduce or explain something to readers,thus the language of explanatory texts is generally simple,concise,clear and professional.The theoretical guidance of this report is Toury’s theory of translation norms.Toury divides the translation norms into three kinds: preliminary norms,initial norms,and operational norms.These three translation norms have both macro and micro instructive significance for translation: macroscopically,they can be closely combined with the whole translation process;microscopically,they can also point out the direction for solving specific problems in translation practice.Under the guidance of Toury’s translation norms,the author tries to provide references for translation of the expository text in the future by demonstrating the author’s translation process,strategies and techniques.The source text has such obvious features,thus the author makes an analysis of the characteristics of the source text under the guidance of Toury’s preliminary norms.It is necessary to reflect professionalism,accuracy,simplicity,etc.,as well as to fully and completely convey the information from the source text to target readers in the translation.In the source text,the modal verb “shall” appears frequently.In order to obtain the proper translation,it is significant to judge the specific meaning of “shall” according to the context.The author selects the translation strategy that favors the readers under the guidance of the initial norms.The translated text should conform to the Chinese expression habits and be easy for readers to understand.In this translation practice,the semantics of some words are relatively vague.For words with semantic ambiguity,the author finds the data through various ways such as Internet and acronyms dictionaries,and thinks to determine the translated text.The sentence patterns of the source text are complex.According to the operational norms,translation techniques such as syntactic linearity,adjustment of order,conversion,and integrated method are adopted under different sentence patterns.