Translating Textbook Illustrations of Understanding Business: A Boundary Awareness Theoretical Perspective

The study explores the translation strategies of illustrations in English business textbooks, with Understanding Business and its two Chinese versions (the tenth and twelfth editions) as examples. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the study finds that three strategies are commonly used to translate illustrations in Understanding Business from English to Chinese: 1. It is necessary to remove the grammatical markers from the attributive structure or relative clauses as much as possible to weaken boundaries, thus making the Chinese more fluent. 2. It is necessary to remove function words. 3. It is necessary to expansion strategy to achieve fluent Chinese. Based on the three findings above, the paper points out how to add or delete in translating illustrations in Understanding Business. To achieve fluent Chinese, it is necessary for translators to remove grammatical markers and function words when translating English to Chinese, meanwhile, it is better to convert result-oriented expressions into process-oriented expressions when translating illustrations from English into Chinese.