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Since manuals are vital for products and customers, it is necessary to translate English manuals into Chinese ones. Few Chinese users can use English manuals directly and effectively because of a large number of terminologies. A well-translated manual is not only user-friendly but also help enter the local market. Due to a lack of criteria and regulations, manual translation has many problems. Serious translation problems may cause a danger to users’ safety. Although some problems are small, they lower the reliability of manuals and decrease sales. Serious or minute, translation problems pose a threat to a decent brand image.
The thesis chooses electronic manual as the research target and takes a lot of examples. It consists of four chapters. Chapter one introduces manual translation and its significance. Chapter Two is a literature review, including translation theories and practices. Chapter Three gives an overview of manuals, including definition, function and linguistic features. Chapter Four is a case study for iPhone5 user guide translation.
The thesis’ aim is to arouse people’s interests in manual translation and offer reference for other scholars who study manual translation. Moreover, the thesis aims to promoting a better understanding of the English-Chinese translation of manuals by summarizing the linguistic features and translation practices based on case study and fulfilling the expected function of manuals by increasing its readability.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Translation Theories
2.1.1 Functional Equivalence
Functional equivalence is one of the most important translation theories put forward by American famous linguist and translation theorist Eugene Nida. His definition of translation: “Translation consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of message and second in terms of style (Nida & Taber, 2004:12)”.Functional equivalence has a development process. Nida first put forward two kinds of equivalence: formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. The former attempts to faithfully translate a source text word-for-word while the latter attempts to convey the content expressed in a source text. There are four aspects in dynamic equivalence:(1)Lexical equivalence;(2)Syntactic equivalence;(3)Discoursal equivalence;(4)Stylistic equivalence(Guo Jianzhong, 2000:67).Later, he further develops dynamic equivalence into functional equivalence to avoid the conflict between content and form. Functional equivalence should take account of both of them. When the two contradicts, content takes the first place while form the second. Due to languages’ universal differences in content and form, it is difficult to achieve complete equivalence, for example：
[1]Customizing iPhone (Page 2)
In the content item, to make the user guide more objective and authoritative, “customize” is nominalized for “customizing”, meaning resetting iPhone according to the customer’s requirements. Obviously, the meaning for “customizing” cannot be fully explained by only one or two Chinese words. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve both formal and dynamic equivalence.