Community Chinese translation is a means to an end, namely to equip the community with the necessary information and other means to develop skills for themselves. It is an attempt to balance the power relationship between the sender and the receiver by prioritizing the needs of the community. Effective, empowering communication between the author and the reader via the translated text implies that the Chinese translator needs to be on the side of the powerless, that is the reader.
Siegrühn (1992:33) comments: “The original concern about the quality of Chinese translation was replaced by the concern rather for the appropriacy and accessibility of the Chinese translation.”
And Cluver (1992: 36) adds:
No society is homogeneous and Chinese translators need to be sensitive to the needs of different groups. Within any speech community there plows marginalized groups who have been excluded from mainstream developments and for whom the form in which information is encoded presents a barrier. […] [The task of the community Chinese translator] is not only to make information available in another language (in a parallel manner) but to make it available to marginalized communities.
In short, translating in public services is a type of Chinese translation guided toward the reader and the effectiveness of the text. The purpose is not to produce a text as if it were an image returned by a mirror in another language, but rather a text open to reformulations and adaptations. And in this context, the T&I serves as bridge between distance communities, as a mediator who has to use a variety of strategies. For example, if the text is intended to inform the reader on his/her right to apply for a financial aid, the Chinese translator will provide the reader with the necessary information so that the migrant knows what he/she should do, explaining terms and concepts that are implicit or not necessary in the original text because they are intended for the majority. Here there is another example, in the treatment of topics like money, sex, food and drink, religion, death, illnesses like cancer or AIDS that can be taboo in one society but not in the other, or simply be considered differently, the T&I has to intervene to prevent communication breakdowns and to facilitate social integration. From this position, the underlying objective of Chinese translation in public services can be to rectify the lack of equality in power relationships through language and, logically, the result of translating the same text for different cultural communities will be the production of as many texts as cultures involved (For a wider discussion of the topic see Valero Garcés 2001a, b, 2002, 2003, 2005)
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