On The C-E Translation Of Pharmaceutical Instructions From The Perspective Of Functionalist Theory

With a view to expanding technical exchanges with foreign countries, English for science and technology (EST) has been playing an important role in the fields of academy and technology.In recent years, with the rapid growth of China's marketing economy, China is now standing in the spotlight of the world. Many foreign-capital companies sweep into huge and potential domestic market, especially some luxury-goods companies, cosmetics, automobile and pharmaceutical enterprises. In order to meet the needs of consumers and take predominance in the market, apart from improving the products'quality, the foreign-capital companies also pay much attention to the quality of the translation of products'instructions. A correctly-translated instruction exerts great influence on consumers'safety and purchasing desire. As an important attachment to the medicine, the quality of the English-Chinese translation of the pharmaceutical instruction has attracted more attention than ever before.The translation of the pharmaceutical instruction, as a special language for science technology, is closely related to the medical translation. Both EST and medical translation boast an important status in China and have attracted many researchers to this field. Therefore, the translation of the pharmaceutical instruction deserves a systematic and deep analysis.As a pragmatic translation, the translation of pharmaceutical instructions requires the translator to consider the function of the target text and the target language readers. In order to provide some effective translation criteria and principles to the translators, the author applies the functionalist theory as the guidance to translating English pharmaceutical instructions. By demonstrating and analyzing the examples quoted from many English pharmaceutical instructions from different perspectives, the author tries her best to make an extensive and profound study to prove that functionalist theory is an appropriate guide to the translation of English pharmaceutical instructions.At first, the paper introduces the characteristics of the EST and pharmaceutical instructions by giving the definitions and classifications of EST and pharmaceutical instructions and analyzing the main features on lexical, syntactic and grammatical levels. Secondly, the paper mainly introduces some representatives of the functionalist theory, such as Peter Newark, Kantharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Hoz Manttari, and Chritiane Nord and their academic perspectives, including the theories of "Skopostheorie", "Translation Theory", "Function plus Loyalty", etc. The theory, together with the features of the pharmaceutical instructions provides a forceful guidance to the criteria and techniques of the translation of pharmaceutical instructions. Finally, abundant examples are given and analyzed in this part, and rules and suggestions are put forward from two aspects—information providing and loyalty.