A Report On C-E Translation Of The Manual Of Automobile Repair And Maintenance(Excerpts)

In recent years,with the development of economic globalization,the momentum of the automotive industry in China has become stronger and overseas market demands have continued to expand.Automotive maintenance manual is designed to meet the needs of after-sales service and its translation is related to the accurate understanding of overseas maintenance personnel on maintenance technologies which concerns the safety of vehicles and the personal safety of the driver and passengers.Therefore,it becomes increasingly important to ensure the translation quality of maintenance manuals under the circumstance.Communicative translation theory stresses effect on target readers should be similar to that produced by the original text as closely as possible and focuses on the response of target readers.Likewise,the maintenance manual puts emphasis on target readers’ receiving degree of information and endeavors to transmit information to readers correctly to achieve communication.Therefore,communicative translation theory is utilized to guide the translation practice.Source text of this translation practice report is excerpted from the translation material The Manual of Automobile Repair and Maintenance.The chapter on chassis is selected as the source text for the report and representative words and sentences are chosen for analysis under the guidance of communicative translation theory.The practice report regards translation as a process of communication on the ground of communicative translation theory and elaborates on translation methods and techniques from the two aspects of vocabulary and syntax.At the lexical level,translation of terminologies should choose collocations which are commonly used in the target language,and translation of category words adopts omission to avoid redundancy and reduce the difficulty of target readers in comprehension.From the perspective of non-subject sentences,a non-subject sentence can be rendered into a passive sentence,“there be”sentence or imperative sentence according to context or a proper subject is added to it.In terms of long sentences,syntactic linearity,structural reorganization,clarifying logical relationship,class shift and other means can be employed to make it conform to mode of thinking of receptors.The translator managed to complete the transformation of source text to target text guided by communicative translation theory and a relatively readable target text was obtained.It is expected that this practice report will provide some reference for the translation of automotive text.