A Study On English Translation Of "About The University" Profiles On Chinese University Web Pages From The Perspective Of Cultural Differences

Internationalization is an inevitable trend in the 21th century, compelling all countries to integrate into this trend. Since its reform and opening up to the outside world, various fields of China face the task of internationalization, including universities. We need not only to embrace those strong points of other nations, but also go to the world and publicize China worldwide. During the process, publicity translation plays a vital role since it is a major channel through which foreigners know China. "About the University" on Chinese university web pages, being a typical sort of publicity material, shoulders the responsibility of publicizing Chinese Universities abroad and absorbing talented international students. However, when browsing Chinese university web pages, we find that the quality of our translated "About the University" is far from satisfying.Based on Lin Wusun(1992), there are two kinds of major problems in Chinese publicity materials translation, i,e., the "hard mistake" and the "soft mistake". The former means linguistic mistakes such as grammatical and spelling mistakes. The latter refers to mistakes caused by cultural disparities of China and the West and the improper translation results from which brings more negative hint to our target readers. "About the University" translation, belonging to publicity translation, has the same kinds of problems. In light of the more negative influence brought about by cultural factors, this thesis will study "About the University" on Chinese university web pages from cultural differences perspective and provide some useful suggestions for overcoming cultural barriers and improving "About the University" translation.The main body part of this thesis will first work out the major cultural problems of "About the University" on Chinese universities web pages based on parallel comparison with our counterpart in main English-speaking countries. To be specific, the cultural problems are:redundancy, strong political color, detached narrative perspective, big and flowery language, lacking uniqueness and general statement of achievement and ideal. Then, these problems are explained by cultural differences. The detailed cultural differences of China and the west that contribute to the above problems are: past-orientation vs future-orientation, "being" culture vs "doing" culture, hierarchy vs individual, perceptual vs rational, high-context vs low-context, fuzziness vs accuracy. Based on the problems and cultural explanations, the last main body part puts forward some feasible translation approaches and skills in overcoming cultural differences in "About the University" translation on Chinese university web pages. The general translation approaches are:be aware of inside-outside difference, be readers-friendly, be down-to-earth. The detailed translation skills are:simplification, omission, addition, annotation and rewriting.