Analysis On English Translation Of Public Service Advertisements In China Daily From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

With China s reform and opening up and economic globalization of the world, Chinasaw a tremendous economic growth in the last decade. People all over the world pay muchattention to China. More and more foreigners come to China to travel and many of themeven settle down. Among them, some like Chinese cultures very much, for example,Chinese kungfu, Beijing opera, acrobatics, Confucianism and Daoism; some enjoy braveryand hospitality of Chinese people; others pay much attention to the environmental,educational, healthy and social problems. What s more, with the rapid development ofChina s growth, many people in the western countries concern Chinese issues.It is well known that China Daily (English version) is regarded as the mostauthoritative English media outlets and an important source of information of Chinesepolicy, economy, culture and society in China. And the public service advertisement (PSA)is a mirror of reflecting the current situation of Chinese public service and it also showsthe degree and depth of Chinese people s public awareness. English translation of PSAs inChina Daily plays a very significant role. On the one hand, it will make foreign peopleknow China well, especially in some public issues such as environment, health, education,etc; on the other hand, it can transfer Chinese culture better and better.Translation of PSAs is a purposeful activity. Its communication functions should bepaid more attention to in the process of translation. According to the Skopostheorie, withinthe framework of the Skopostheorie, translators are flexible to select whatever informationor translation strategies they think appropriate to reach the intended functions of thetranslation, because, the source text is only an offer of information. Skopostheorie whichfocuses on the functionality of the target text in the target culture will shed light on PSAtranslation.Compared with the traditional equivalence theory, Skopostheorie has explored a newperspective for translation study. At present, in fact, there are a lot of translation studies incommercial advertisements from the perspective of Skopostheorie. But relatively it is rare for PSAs translation study, and it is even rarer for English translation study of PSAs inChina Daily. Because of the significant and influential status of China Daily at home andabroad, this paper is a tentative study of English translation of PSAs in China Daily since2008from the perspective of Skopostheorie and attempts to find some translationstrategies for PSAs. The author uses the descriptive method to analyze the contents,functions, sentential structures, textual structures and language features of PSAs in ChinaDaily. By analyzing some translation examples, the author finds that translation of PSAsin China Daily is a purposeful activity. If there is no cultural conflict between sourceculture and target culture, literal translation can be used; if there are some culturalconflicts between them, other translation strategies, such as, free translation, adaptation,imitation and concretization can be used.