The Employment Of Generic Structure Translation Strategies In Chinese Alcohol Product Instruction Texts

With China entering WTO and with the opening up of its domestic markets, more and more foreigners take an interest in the Chinese alcohol product and the Chinese alcohol culture as well.Chinese alcohol has a long history and bears its unique culture,and people have come to realize its spiritual culture values.Since the alcohol product instruction is considered to be one of the most important media to diffuse the Chinese alcohol culture to the westerners,all the Chinese alcohol manufacturers are trying to show and explain their unique alcohol culture through the alcohol product instruction.That is why the translation work of the Chinese alcohol product instruction also seems extremely important,since a good translation of the Chinese alcohol product instruction can help the potential consumers abroad understand our alcohol culture better and accept our alcohol products more easily. Then what kind of translation strategies should be adopted in order to do a good translation work? This thesis attempts to answer this question by doing some research work under the guidance of functional approach.We have collected 12 Chinese alcohol product instructions as the data to make the analysis.Firstly we try to classify the data into three categories according to their different contents and sub-social purposes.For each category of the Chinese alcohol instruction,we try to employ the GSP of some popular genres as the tool to do our translation work.Based on our analysis and translation practice,we tentatively conclude that first,if the alcohol product instruction contains some allegoric meanings of the alcohol,we may try to employ General-Particular text pattern to translate it. The reason for doing so is that this type of the alcohol product instruction always indicates several allegoric meanings of the alcohol,or one meaning involved in several aspects and there always exists a general statement about these allegoric meanings at the beginning of the instruction,and General-Particular text pattern is very suitable for this type of text,and can satisfactorily help fulfill the social purpose of this type of the text.Second,if an alcohol product instruction contains some health caring functions of the alcohol,we may try to employ Problem-Solution text pattern to translate it.The reason for doing so is that the purpose of this type of the alcohol product instruction is to provide some solutions for the problems that the potential customers have,and the social purpose of Problem-Solution text pattern just agrees with that of this type of text and can satisfactorily help fulfill the social purpose of this type of the text.Third,if an alcohol product instruction contains the historical stories indicating the cultural source of the alcohol,we may try to employ Narrative text pattern in the translation work.The reason for doing so is that the purpose of this type of the alcohol product instruction is to provide some alcohol history by telling a historical story,and the Narrative text pattern can help fulfill that social purpose of the story telling text.Generally speaking,through the employment of certain popular GSPs of some genres in the translated alcohol product instruction texts,we can present foreigners the translated versions with a more logic construction and more satisfactory explanation,which may help to unmarkedly realize the social purpose of the translated alcohol instruction text,and thus helps the translated versions achieve the contextual equivalence with the source text.