Assessment Of The English Versions Of Product Introductions Of Alcoholic Drinks-From Functionalist Approaches

Nowadays, with the development of the Internet, more and more companies and enterprises have set up their websites to market their products or services; some famous brands of alcoholic drink in China, in order to compete for the potential overseas customers, have their web pages appear both in Chinese and English. Product introductions on web pages, as one type of advertising, play an important role in marketing the products and services.The quality of Chinese-English translation of the product introductions of alcoholic drinks goes a long way in determining the sales volume of the products in the international market and the image of the companies as a whole. From the functionalist approaches, and the perspective of Skopostheorie in particular, the present thesis aims to assess the English versions of the Chinese product introductions of alcoholic drinks on the web pages. Suggested versions for the poor translations of the introductions will be provided. All that is done here is hoped to be of some help to draw more attention to the Chinese-English translation of the product introductions of alcoholic drinks and thereby improve the image and competitive strength of the companies involved.According to the translation-oriented text typology and text functions proposed respectively by Reiss and Nord, product introductions fall into the category of informative and vocative text-types, which aim to provide readers with the information concerning the products and, more importantly, to call on the readership to act and finally to buy the products. The English versions of the product introductions share the same purpose of inducing the English readers to buy the products as the original. The Skopostheorie gives top priority to the intended purpose of the translated texts in the target language, which serves the communicative function of commercial advertising.With the help of Nord's model for translation-oriented text analysis, the author finds out how the Chinese and English product introductions of alcoholic drinks differ after conducting the analysis of the intratextual and extratextual factors in the Chinese product introductions and the parallel English product introductions. On the one hand, the Skopostheorie guides the assessment, from an overall point of view, of the English versions of the Chinese product introductions; the findings in the text analysis of some of the samples, on the other, stands as the framework of reference against which a large part of the assessment is done. Improvements of the poor translation are accordingly suggested in light of the functionalist approaches. The author comes to the conclusion: the functionalist approaches serve well the purpose of the translation of product introductions of alcoholic drinks; in practice, the translator should first of all determine the text type and text function of the target text in the target language and culture before coming to understand and make use of the target reader's expectations, socially, culturally and linguistically cultivated, of product introductions of alcoholic drinks; to realize the intended purpose, readjustment or reorganization is required to choose the information needed in accordance with the Skopos in the top-down translation process.