A Report On The Translation Of “Light Tanks: A Missing Priority For The Indian Army”

The source text for this translation task,“Light Tanks: A Missing Priority for the Indian Army”,is taken from a compilation initiated in July 2021 by the Observer Research Foundation,a renowned Indian think tank.It explores why the Indian Army does not favor light tanks and makes a case to show the importance of light tanks for the Indian Army and hence the necessity of timely equipment.Given the current China-Indian relations,the translation of such academic texts that assess the operational capabilities of the Indian Army will serve as an essential reference for those who want to know more about the Indian military.This translation report investigates ways to achieve coherence in the target text under the framework of Wang Dongfeng’s theory on coherence.The source text is an academic text with a strong logical structure.As a result,this research examines how coherence theory be used in the translation of academic texts from the perspectives of grammatical,semantic,and pragmatic coherence.To be more specific,the translator aims to achieve coherence in the translation on the basis of faithfulness to the original text by adding subjects,repeating the substituted words,adding connectives,taking meaning out of form,and adding illustrative background information,so that the translation is more consistent with idiomatic Chinese and more palatable to target readers.Through this translation practice,it can be found that the translation of academic texts is not all about code-switching,but should also realize the coherence with the external environment of the translated text while establishing the internal information coherence of the translated text.