目的论的角度下英语经济新闻的汉译(8)
Capital and Companies from China are sidling into Europe. The Chinese version is: 中国资本及企业正悄然进入欧洲市场。(The Economist, Apr. 9th, 2013)
In this example, the original sentence structure and habits of expression are consistent with the Chinese version, so we can preclude the use of literal approach.
2.3.2 Translation of Words Related to Numbers
Numbers and the words related to numbers are indispensible parts in economic news. To some extent, numbers create news. Numbers can bring a lot of fun to translation process, but also bring many difficulties. While translating words related to numbers, translator must be extremely careful, because a tiny negligence could commit a serious mistake. A successful translation for words related to numbers make economic statistics vivid, visualized and popular.
While translating the cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, multiplicative numbers, and percentage, it is easy to translate. It is mentioned before in the introduction part, fidelity rule means there must be an inter-textual coherence between the source texts and target texts, which is similar to the fidelity to the source texts. So all translator should to do are to abide by the fidelity rule of Skopos theory. In other words being loyalty to the source numbers. Then the target versions should be maximally faithful to the source.
While translating the unit of quantity, it is not so difficult to abide by the fidelity rule. For example: hundred, thousand, million, billion, and trillion. The difficult point is the related cultural background about those units. In general, the Great Britain and German use million as unit, called United Kingdom English System. And America, France, Russia and some European countries are accustomed with thousand, called Continental English System. So before translation, translator should clarify what kind of system is it used. However nowadays news written in American English are of overwhelming dominance. Specifically speaking, “one billion” should be called as one thousand million.
So while translating the classifiers under fidelity rule, translator should select appropriate Chinese to translate literally. But many of plural forms need long-term accumulation to remember. For example:
By hundreds in Chinese means “多达数百、许许多多”, in tens in Chinese means “十个”,dozens of in Chinese means “数十个”, scores of times in Chinese means “很多次”, and so on. (Liu, 2009:141)