Functionalist Approaches Applied Into Corporate Profiles Translation

With the development of globalization and China's boom in economy, more and more Chinese enterprises are expanding their business into other countries. For the people who have no idea of what the company is like, a corporate profile, like a business card for a businessman, provides a quick access to the general understanding. Corporate profile plays an especially important role in publicizing the company, establishing its good corporate image, promoting its products and services and increasing its market share. It is a major contributor toward the first impression buyers will have of a company and is a great opportunity to gain their trust. Nowadays, a large number of companies have bilingual introductions on their websites or other publicity materials, which shows that they have realized the importance and necessity of English corporate profiles. Unfortunately, the quality of the English version is dubious and unacceptable due to the prevalent mistakes and errors in wording, phrasing, style, structure; some are even word-for-word renderings of the Chinese original. An ineffective company profile simply hinders the communication between a company and its foreign customers and investors, or even produces a negative impact on the company. At present, studies have been made in practical C-E translation but few have specialized in the translation of corporate profiles. In order to explore this issue deeply and solve existing problems, there must be a systematic and in-depth study.Traditionally, "loyalty", "faithfulness" and "equivalence" are always the norms that translators follow. "Faithfulness", "expressiveness" and "elegance" brought forward by Yan Fu have long been followed as the classic criteria for any translation in China, among which "faithfulness" requires that translated texts be faithful to source texts both in content and form as far as possible. According to the Functionalists, the prime principle determining any translation process is the purpose of the overall translational action. Due to differences in cultural background, thinking mode and customs, there must be some diversity between the expected function of the translated text and the acceptance of the target readers. The translator, based on an analysis of the source text, is justified to adopt various strategies to achieve the intended function of the target text. Viewing the source text as "an offer of information", the translator decides to retain elements that help fulfill the intended function and to delete or adapt elements that help little for the fulfillment of the intended function. Corporate profiles can be easily found in the companies' brochures or on their websites, which provide the readers with some basic information about the company, such as background information, property, products or services, enterprise culture, staff, situation and so on; in addition, corporate profiles play an important role in publicizing the company, impressing the targeted readers and promoting business or cooperation. Therefore, they are informative and vocative. After a preliminary analysis of the corporate profiles, the author finds that traditional translation theories excessively stress "faithfulness" and "equivalence" without considering language and cultural differences between Chinese and English, which must have negative effect on the publicity of the company. But functionalist approaches consider that the translation shall be reader-centered and the intended purpose of the translation may decide translation brief and strategies. As a result, the author regards that the functionalist translation approaches can provide theoretical foundation and effective strategies for the translation of Chinese corporate profiles.This thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. It briefly outlines the background, topic, methodology and basic structure of this thesis.The second chapter makes a brief retrospection of the development of functionalist approaches and explains the representative theories such as Nida's Principle of Dynamic/Functional Equivalence, Skopos Theory, Newmark's Text-Type Classifications and Justa Holz-Manttari's Theory of Translational Action, which provide a theoretical support for the C-E translation of corporate profiles.The third chapter introduces content contained in a corporate profile and summarizes the stylistic features and functions of corporate profiles.The fourth chapter makes a comparison between corporate profiles and English ones in lexical, syntax, form, stylistic features, discourse and cultural aspects, so as to let translators take full account of these differences in the process of translation.In Chapter Five, in order to make the study more practical and effective, the author makes a typical case study on the translation of corporate profile in Liaoning Province. On the basis of analysis on the abundant materials collected, the author makes an overview of the translation status of corporate profiles in Liaoning Province and finds out that there are various problems and errors existing in linguistic and syntactic levels, as well as those caused by cultural differences, lack of theoretic guidance and translation competence. Then the author summarizes the translation criteria observed in the C-E translation of corporate profiles in Liaoning Province. Finally, some solutions to the existing problems are put forward from both macro and micro perspectives under the guidance of functionalist approaches. Macro solutions involve the concern of the whole society, the improvement of translators' competence, control of translation quality, media supervision and so on, while micro solutions mainly refer to the specific translation strategies adopted, such as restructuring, addition or annotation, abridgement or deletion, proper handling of culture-related information and modeling translation.The sixth chapter is the conclusion. This chapter summarizes the whole thesis and points out the theoretical and practical value of this thesis. It is the author's hope that not only Liaoning enterprises, but overall Chinese companies should realize the importance of effective corporate profiles and thus take actions to produce English profiles that semantically clear, structurally cohesive and culturally acceptable.