A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Mobile Phone Update User Manual From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Text Type Theory

As information technology improves by leaps and bounds against the backdrop of ongoing economic globalization,high-tech products of software and hardware mushroom into the global market.Numerous Chinese companies manage to keep abreast with the time.As an indispensable part of product deliverables,technical documents facilitate users to understand and use products properly and play a role in the transmission and interaction of technical information throughout the life cycle of technical products.However,research on the translation of technical documents is still inadequate,and corresponding theoretical guidance and systematic summaries of translation solutions for translators are much required.As an empirical report,this thesis takes 15000 words extracted from Mobile Phone Update User Manual,one representative form of technical documents,as the research object to verify that the difficulties encountered in the translation process could be well handled under the Text Type Theory from Peter Newmark.According to Newmark’s text type theory,texts are divided into expressive function texts,informative function texts,and vocative function texts.Mobile Phone Update User Manual is regarded as an informative text that contains extensive instructions and explanations,and the semantic and communicative translation methods proposed by Peter Newmark are highly instructive to the troubleshooting in technical documents.This report identifies major characteristics and corresponding solutions at the lexical,syntactical,and textual levels in the translation of technical documents,aiming to provide references for translators and scholars engaged in technical document translation.The translation of the user manual could challenge translators in various manners.The mistranslation of terminology could mislead target readers and jeopardize the reputation of products.The highly interactive technical documents could obscure translators who have limited knowledge of jargon in the related field,hindering the readability of target texts.Plus,textual incoherence exerts a subtle influence on information communication and dissemination.To this end,this report adopts abundant case studies to analyze how to achieve the best reproducing of the source text.Paraphrasing and zero translation are adopted to tackle issues at the lexical level;conversion and division are applied to handle syntactical-level difficulties;cohesion and coherence are emphasized at the textual level to boost readability and improve user experience.