A Practice Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Leading Lean （Excerpts）

This is a report on the translation of excerpts from Leading Lean.The source text,written by Jean Dahl,who is the founder and executive director of the Modern Lean Institute,is known as a thirty-year experience book.As an innovative enterprise lean flow leader and transformational change agent,Ms.Dahl lays out a new holistic framework for developing modern lean leaders.The source text demonstrates why leaders need to embrace modern lean principles and thinking to continuously evolve the lean enterprise.The translation attempts to provide theoretical and practical guidance for modern enterprises and is of social value.At present,it has not been officially published in Chinese.The first two chapters of the book has been translated.Chapter one is mainly about crisis in leadership,and chapter two is mainly about modern lean framework.The book is a non-literary text of economic management with strong practicability and logic.Its main purpose is to provide readers with information and methods to deal with problems.Therefore,the formal style of the translation should be retained as far as possible.The translator tries to study and practice management text translation from three levels: lexical,syntactic and textual level.At the lexical level,the interpretation of terminologies in dictionaries often dose not conform to the meaning expressed in the context,which brings great difficulties to translation;At the syntactic level,the logical word order of English sentences is very different from that of Chinese,which requires the translator to reasonably adjust the sentence structure in translation;At the textual level,there is a close logical relationship between the sentences in the source text,which requires the translator to pay attention to it in order to achieve textual cohesion and coherence.Based on textual characteristics of the source text,the translator explores how to realize the“Functional Equivalence” at the lexical,syntactic and textual level under the guidance of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory.According to Nida’s theory,translation consists in producing in the receptors’ language the closest natural equivalent to the message of the source language,first in meaning,and secondly in style,so that target readers’ response to the translation is consistent with that of the original readers.So,in the translation of management text,translators must consider the reader-oriented principle and information accuracy principle from Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory.Based on these two principles,the translation cases at lexical,syntactic and textual level in Leading Lean are analyzed: in terms of lexical level,the translator proposes the translation strategies such as annotation and using four-character phrases;in terms of syntactic level,the translator selects the translation strategies such as amplification and omission,order change,division and free translation;in terms of textual level,the translator adopts the translation strategy of reconstruction and rewriting.This report finds that Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory can effectively guide the translation practice of management text.Nevertheless,there are still many deficiencies in this report,including the lack of professional knowledge and background information related to management,and ability to make full use of dictionaries and network resources;and owing to cross-cultural communication barriers,text form adjustment and other reasons,there is still incomplete equivalence in target text.Thus,the translation quality still needs to be improved.