Coporate Promotional Material And Its English Translation: A Skopostheorie Perspective

With the development of economic globalization, China has madeever-increasing trade and economic exchanges with various countries inthe world. Under these circumstances, Chinese corporations have evermore chances to enter into international market and to compete withsimilar products in the world market. A well translated corporatepromotional material contributes to the good reputation of a company andits products, and helps to improve the competitiveness of Chinesecorporations in the international market. As a special text type, thepurpose of corporate promotional material is to project a goodcorporation image, to promote its products or services, and to improve thecompetitiveness of Chinese corporation in the international market. Theobjective of corporate promotional material translation is also like this. Inview of the special translational purpose of corporate promotionalmaterial, traditional translational theories cannot achieve the purposesuccessfully. In this thesis, the author provides Skopostheorie, a newguiding theory, for the study of corporate promotional materialtranslation.Skopostheorie is one of the most important translation theories inGerman functionalist approaches, which has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. It regards translation as an action which has acertain skopos. This purpose determines the whole process of translation.That is, the end justifies the means. The translation strategies should beunder the guidance of the expected translation purpose. According toSkopostheorie, the top-ranking rule for any translation is the skopos rule.Besides, there are still two other principles in functionalist translationtheories. That is coherence rule and fidelity rule. These two rules aresubordinate to the skopos rule. The main concepts of functionalistapproaches have significant meaning to corporate promotional materialtranslation.Corporate promotional material translation deals with not onlylanguage, but also the culture. There are great differences betweenChinese and English corporate promotional materials at linguistic andcultural levels. In the course of Chinese to English corporate promotionalmaterial translation, the linguistic and cultural features of Englishcorporate promotional material have to be observed carefully in order tocater to the English readership's habits and expectations.This thesis takes Skopostheorie as a theoretical framework. Itdiscusses the linguistic and cultural features of English and Chinesecorporate promotional material after explaining the purposes andfunctions of corporate promotional material. The English translation ofChinese corporate promotional material should take these aspects into consideration in order to fulfill the purpose of the original text. Literaltranslation and adaptive translation are the main strategies that arecommonly used in this process, especially the latter one. Besides, thisthesis points out that a translator plays a creative role in the translationprocess.Of course, it is worth noting that these strategies are not solutions toall the corporate promotional materials translation. The author ultimateobjective is to shed light on the way forward.