A Study Of The English Homepages Of China's "985 Project" Universities-A Functionalist Approach

Along with the globalization, there are an increasing number of international communication activities. Under this circumstance, many universities of China intend to enhance their publicity, seeking for international communication and cooperation in a wider range; therefore, they present English homepages, introducing the universities in general, most of which are translated from the Chinese versions. As an important channel of external publicity, it is extremely necessary for these universities to have highly qualified English homepages. However, due to various reasons, these English homepages are not that satisfactory, and fail to realize their functions.This thesis takes functionalism as its theoretical foundation and regards the"985 Project"universities as its research objects. Since these universities are of the highest level of education in China, the findings and results are persuasive to a certain degree. The author collects from the Internet the English homepages of these universities, providing a large amount and reliable material for the thesis. Besides that, the author gets some feedbacks and suggestions from some English native speakers on the acceptability of the English homepages of China's"985 Project"universities. After gathering and analyzing their feedbacks, it is found that there are various kinds of problems and errors during the process of translating, including grammatical ones, syntactic ones and Chinglish. Moreover, as for the translation of the technical and organizational terms of certain awards and research programs, no agreement has been achieved. In addition, some other mistakes, such as redundancy, improper information processing, and lack of timely updating and so on need immediate attention and urgent improvement.This thesis firstly introduces the historical and current studies on non-literary translation, external publicity, and the translation of universities'homepages as well. After that, a further explanation is carried out on the theories and ideas of the four outstanding representatives of functionalism, including Katharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz-Manttari and Christiane Nord. Some of their ideas that are useful and beneficial to the analysis of the thesis are synthesized and made use of in the later discussion.Based on that, the thesis then introduces the characteristics of the university's homepage, illustrates the feasibility of functionalist approach in homepage translation, and identifies the text type of homepage. In the light of functionalism, and referring to the feedbacks of the English native speakers, it classifies the problems and errors in homepage translation into different aspects—pragmatic, cultural, linguistic and text-specific. The reasons are also discussed from the perspectives of translation brief, translator, translation skill and quality control.Finally, on the basis of problem and error analysis, the thesis provides a series of suggested improvements from both macro and micro perspectives. For example, in order to ensure that the English version successfully transfers the information the readers expect, sometimes addition, simplification or reconstructing are needed. It is widely acknowledged that only effective translations can achieve the goal of external publicity.