A Functionalist Approach To The Translation Chinese Sports Event Speeches

Sport event is a window through which China could easily communicate with the outside world and show her culture and competence. A good way for the foreign sport officials and all the other foreigners interested and involved in sport to know sport event in China in the first place is through sport event speeches. Study on C-E translation of Sport event speech becomes a must, for it facilitates the sport exchanges between China and other countries and makes the foreigners especially those sport officials at various levels to have better knowledge of competence and culture of China. However, the existing studies on the C-E translation of Chinese sports event speeches are insufficient. This dissertation is working on the C-E translation of Chinese sports event speeches from functionalist approach. Hopefully, with this dissertation's efforts, the studies on C-E translation of Chinese sports event speeches can be supplemented or even enhanced much.The dissertation is an effort to turn to the Skopostheorie or functionalist approach for analyzing and comparing the Chinese sports event speeches and the parallel English texts, trying to identify the translation errors based on the findings in the analysis and comparison, by way of assessing the quality of the translation and, lastly, establishing some translation strategies.The study shows that the Chinese sports event speeches differ from the parallel English texts in that they devote a lot of space to detailing the government's favorable attitudes towards and support of sports events and especially the contributions the sponsoring parties make to a sports event, the part of it irrelevant to the sports events bulking very large quite often and the composition and content will take on a simple, standardized and open-to-all nature. And the Chinese sentences are observed to be very long, with the clauses possessing different subjects or with the clauses sharing one subject, all the clauses hanging together without using conjunctions or connective devices. Moreover, the Chinese sports event speeches put greater value on "words for enhancing atmosphere and beautifying language" and words for carrying cultural elements. Based on translation strategies established in this dissertation, the translator is advised to do away with the content devoted to detailing the sports event sponsor's contributions, development and the government's attitudes towards the sports event and use the simple sentence construction, aided by various language elements such as words or phrases as post-modifiers, words or phrases as inserted elements and words or phrases as the adverbial of cause, manner, time and etc and, in a few cases, complex sentences. To deal with lexis, the translator has to make sure that essential information is kept in the process, to neutralize the cultural connotations of some cultural words and the exaggerative effects those words for enhancing atmosphere and/or beautifying language might produce, simply by using plain language to convey the meanings and by shortening the words or phrases.