Study On Translator's Subjectivity In C-E Translation Of Publicity Materials From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

With the globalization across the world, China's reform and opening up to the outside becomes increasingly further and her economic and cultural exchanges with the rest of the world growingly frequent. This gives rise to a constant need for publicity materials and their translation. The main functions of publicity materials are informative, vocative, and communicative; and the aim of Chinese-English (C-E) translation of publicity materials is to ensure the target readers'accurate and obstruction-free comprehension of the information the source text (ST) conveys. To achieve this purpose, the translator should try everything possible to overcome the differences of style, logic, and culture between Chinese and English languages, and adopt a target language-centered approach to make the target readers fully and accurately catch the information of the ST. Therefore, rather than translating the original Chinese publicity materials word by word and sentence by sentence, the translator should subjectively apply translation strategies and methods of rewriting, deletion, addition, or reconstructing etc. Namely, the translator of publicity materials can fully play his subjectivity through the process of translation. This may violate the traditional translation principles attaching great importance to"faithfulness"and"equivalence". How can this translation phenomenon be explained? And what is its theoretical foundation? This thesis tries to find an answer from the Skopostheorie.Skopos is the Greek word for"aim"or"purpose"and was introduced into translation theory in the 1970s by Hans Vermeer as a technical term for the purpose of a translation and of the action of translating. Skopos theory (Skopostheorie) focuses above all on the purpose of the translation, which determines the translation strategy and methods that are to be employed in order to produce a functionally adequate result. An important advantage of Skopostheorie is that it allows the possibility of the same text being translated in different ways according to the purpose of the target text (TT) and the translation briefs given by the initiator to the translator. This challenges the dominant position of the ST and emancipates translator from the constrain of ST since it studies translation action from a new angle—the translator.In view of the special characteristics of publicity materials, their translation strategy and methods should be different from those of other genres. However, the traditional translation theories emphasizing"faithfulness"and"equivalence"seem increasingly inadequate and the previous studies of C-E translation of publicity materials are far from satisfactory for they largely focus on individual words, phrases, sentences and certain unsystematic translation skills. Researches on the translator, the crucial factor of the translation process, and the related translation strategy leave much to be desired. Skopostheorie can't be regarded as the most influential theory in the western translation circle, but it does provide a solid theoretical support for the practice of C-E translation of publicity materials. Taking Skopostheorie as the framework, this thesis seeks to open a new perspective for C-E translation of publicity materials with specific Skopos.