On Translating Résumés From Chinese To English

With the development of economy globalization,career path becomes more and more international and a good English résuméfor job application is very important for the job hunters. Résumé, as a special applicable business style, the important media of job hunting and company recruitment, plays a significant role in the career path of employees and in the employment of the recruiters. Owing to the importance of résumé, and a far distance from Chinese and Western values, the Chinese-English translation of résumés is worth of consideration and study. Résuméhas its own features. Résumétranslation also has its own features, which are different from those of other kinds of translations such as literary translation.This thesis is an attempt to employ functional theory and reader's response theory to analyze résumétranslation,which is deemed to be the theory most suitable and reasonable for résumétranslation. This thesis looks into the feasibility and application of functional equivalence and reader's response theory, especially translation variation, in the new angle of the translation of résumés for job application.The functional features, the linguistic features and the analysis of the résumés'reader (ie. the recruiters) are the focus of this thesis. As a summarized self-introduction and self-evaluation, résumés carry the informative and persuasive function, and have their own distinct linguistics features in the four levels: lexical, syntactical, rhetorical and textual. In the light of functionalist approaches to translation, and the readers'response theory, with a considerable amount of examples,the thesis discusses some specific techniques that are suitable and useful for résumétranslation. The thesis possesses to two specific principals for résuméC-E translation, that is,exactness and conciseness after a systematic analysis of stylistic features of résuméis discussed at lexical, syntactic, rhetorical and textual levels. It also comes to the strategy of résumétranslation,which is under the guidance of these three principles. In this thesis,free translation is regarded as a main strategy of résumétranslation.The thesis draws a conclusion that the real communicative effect should be the first concern of résumétranslation and translators should be more adaptive in dealing with the specific text type and try to retain both the form and content of the specific cultural images.