Studies On C-E Translation Of Enterprise Profiles

An enterprise profile is a kind of practical writing to introduce and promote the enterprise or institute,and it can be seen in all kinds of media like newspapers, magazines,websites,etc.Many enterprises put bilingual profiles on their website to introduce their products and services in hope of expanding business into western markets by making the enterprise known to foreign customers.However,the improper and nonstandard English versions of the profiles have been a pressing problem because they have tarnished not only the enterprise's image but China's international image.This thesis attempts to find strategies for improvement by comparing and analyzing errors found in the English versions of enterprise profiles.A large number of errors in C-E enterprise profile translation reveal a fact that translation of enterprise profile is far from being satisfactory.Translators need to improve their English proficiency especially in terms of word choice,grammar and cross-cultural communication.Firstly,135 authentic samples of enterprise profiles are downloaded randomly from the companies' website or books,constituting a small corpus for the author to make a detailed and thorough analysis of the features of this text genre and locate common problems in translation.Secondly,according to the levels of errors by Carl James,the errors in C-E enterprise profile translation were also specified on three linguistic levels:the levels of substance,text and discourse.In this study,substance errors mainly focused on misspellings.Text errors consist of lexical errors and grammar errors,and discourse errors incoherence and pragmatic errors.Thirdly,from the perspective of diagnosis of errors,the errors were attributed to interlingual errors,intralingual errors and translators' incompetence and poor management of translation authoritative institution.As for interlingual errors,they were caused by mother tongue influence.As to intralingual errors,they were considered from two aspects:learning strategy-based errors and communication strategy-based errors.To the problems found in translating enterprise profiles,suggestions on how to improve the quality of enterprise profile translation have been given.As for lexical errors,special attention should be paid to systagmatic and semantic relations (collocation and prefabricated chunks),paradigmatic and semantic relationship (semantic field) and lexicalization.As for functional equivalence,suggestions are put forward from the perspectives of cultural adjustment and aesthetic equivalence.As for the capacity of translators and management of translation,strategies for continuous improvement are proposed.In summary,it is urgent to study the errors in C-E translation of enterprise profiles.By doing so,the present deficiency of C-E enterprise profile translation is revealed and strategies for improvement are proposed so as to transmit accurate information to foreigners and promote international business.Therefore,it has both social and economical value.