The Fulfillment Of The Skopos In C-E Translation

As one of China’s foreign-language media, China Today, a monthly magazine founded in 1952,plays an important role in introducing China’s culture,geography,economy, social affairs to the outside world. Focusing on the C-E publicity translation of China Today (Chinese texts are translated into English ones),this paper sets out to examine its translation quality to further investigate if the translation has achieved its presumed translation skopos or expected publicity effects (or its publicity-oriented skopos) from an interdisciplinary point of view, that is on the basis of both German Functionalism and communication science. After a literature research, the present study conducts a top-down descriptive analysis of bilingual texts of the magazine’s Economy column published in 2015 (from the pragmatic level to conventions and finally to the linguistic text-surface structures) by comparing it with some mainstream parallel texts of Western countries and referring to the writing principles of journalism. What’s more,from the feedback of its foreign readers, the present study investigated its foreign publicity effects. The findings indicate that a variety of translation strategies adopted by the translator such as omission, amplification, and rewriting, etc. are acceptable and reasonable from the perspective of functionalist translation theories and most of the translated texts are readable and in agreement with target-text receivers’ expectation; all conducive to the attainment of its text functions. To some extent,the translation is greatly conducive to the magazine’s generally good evaluation. However,some translation errors like grammatical errors, Chinglish and proofreading errors, etc. were also found, which will no doubt negatively influence its publicity effects. With an analysis of possible reasons and consequences of these translation mistakes, it is suggested that the instrumental translation strategy and audience study should be adopted and the conventions of news writing be learned through the analysis of similar texts.