A Report On The English-to-Chinese Translation Of “Cybersecurity Concerns For The Energy Sector In The Maritime Domain” From The Perspective Of Koller’s Equivalence Theory

The source text “Cybersecurity Concerns for the Energy Sector in the Maritime Domain” is selected from the Issue Brief published by the Atlantic Council,an American think tank,on December 6,2021.The Brief,which is a scientific and technical text in nature,examines the harmful cyber vulnerabilities that the energy sector faces in the maritime domain,analyzes the significance for the energy sector to rise up to the challenges posed by the cyber,and concludes with some recommendations for the people in relevant domains.In the real world,the cyber domain,the energy sector and the maritime domain are increasingly interconnected and interact with each other.Besides this,great power competition is intensifying.Against such a backdrop,the selected material for translation is closely related to the needs of the realistic competition.Translating texts of this nature is beneficial for China to know about the cyber risks in the energy sector in the maritime domain and get itself ready to keep these risks at bay.The report takes as its theoretical framework the “Equivalence Theory” put forward by the well-known linguist Werner Koller in 1979,focuses on the characteristics of the scientific and technical text,and analyzes the application of the Equivalence Theory from three aspects:“denotative equivalence”,“connotative equivalence”,and “text-normative equivalence”.Specifically,Koller argues that translation can be understood as the result of a text-processing activity,by means of which a source-language text is transposed into a target-language text.In this process,some “equivalence relations” may exist between the source text and the target text.On the lexical level,the translator gives an analysis of denotative equivalence between the source text and the target text from three aspects: “one-to-one”,“one-to-many”,and “one-tozero”.Then she makes an elaboration on the realization of connotative equivalence between the source text and the target text from the two dimensions of “range” and “evaluation”.On the textual level,the translator focuses her attention on text-normative equivalence,exploring the equivalence relationships between the source text and the target text from three aspects: “word class shift”,“voice conversion”,and “sentence structure adjustment”.Through translation practice,it is found that Koller’s “Equivalence Theory” can contribute to producing a target text with precise meaning and certain language norms in the translation process.This finding may be helpful in translating scientific and technical texts from the perspective of Koller’s theory.