Analysis Of Chinese Profile Translation

With the development of globalization and China’s boom in economy, more and more Chinese enterprises are expanding their business into other countries. For the people who have no idea of what the company is like, a corporate profile, like a business card for a businessman, provides a quick access to the general understanding. Corporate profile plays an especially important role in publicizing the company, establishing its good corporate image, promoting its products and services and increasing its market share. It is a major contributor toward the first impression buyers will have of a company and is a great opportunity to gain their trust. Nowadays, a large number of companies have bilingual introductions on their websites or other publicity materials, which shows that they have realized the importance and necessity of English corporate profiles. Unfortunately, the quality of the English version is dubious and unacceptable due to the prevalent mistakes and errors in wording, phrasing, style, structure; some are even word-for-word renderings of the Chinese original. An ineffective company profile simply hinders the communication between a company and its foreign customers and investors, or even produces a negative impact on the company. At present, studies have been made in practical C-E translation but few have specialized in the translation of corporate profiles. In order to explore this issue deeply and solve existing problems, there must be a systematic and in-depth study.This thesis concludes that from the functionalist point of view, translation is not merely a linguistic process. Guided by the translation brief and taking into account the translation Skopos and the target addressees’situation, the translator selects certain items from the source-language offer of information and processes them in order to form a new offer of information in the target language. It is the specification of the function of the source text or its elements such as content or structure that permits the translator to decide whether or not these elements are useful or adequate to the desired purpose of the target text.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. It briefly outlines the background, purpose, methodology and basic structure of this thesis.The second chapter makes a brief retrospection of the development of functionalist approaches and explains the representative theories such as Skopos Theory, Newmark’s Text-Type Classifications and Justa Holz-Manttari’s Theory of Translational Action, which provide a theoretical support for the C-E translation of corporate profiles.The third chapter introduces content contained in a corporate profile and summarizes the functions, similarities and differences of corporate profiles, this chapter makes a comparison between corporate profiles and English ones in stylistic features, discourse and cultural aspects, so as to let translators take full account of these differences in the process of translation.In Chapter Four, under the guidance of functionalist approaches, the author put forward the specific translation strategies, such as interpretation, restructuring, deletion, proper handling of culture-related information and modeling translation.The fifth chapter is the conclusion. This chapter summarizes the whole thesis and points out the theoretical and practical value of this thesis. It is the author’s hope that Chinese companies should realize the importance of effective corporate profiles and thus take actions to produce English profiles that semantically clear, structurally cohesive and culturally acceptable.