On C-E Translation Of Company Profiles From The Perspective Of Functionalist Translation Theory

Nowadays, a large number of Chinese companies have bilingual introductions ontheir websites, which shows that many companies have realized the importance of theEnglish version of company profiles in attracting the eyeballs of foreign potentialcustomers. However, the quality of the English version is dubious and unacceptabledue to the prevalent mistakes and errors in wording, phrasing, style and structure.Some are even word-for-word renderings of the Chinese original without consideringcultural factors. The existence of these translation problems will not only havenegative effect on company's image, but also will hinder trade development, whichshould draw the translators' attentionIn this study, the author makes a preliminary discussion on the translationproblems and solutions arising in the process of translation under the direction offunctionalist theory, aiming at achieving the equivalent function of parallel texts andremoving the puzzlement and misunderstanding of target readers.The study will conduct a comparative text analysis and qualitative research on 20Chinese discourses from the top 100 companies in 2009 and 20 English discourses ofEurope and America from Fortune 500 in 2009 in a wide range of business fields.Based on the functionalist theory, the present study summarizes the extra andintratextual factors especially on the levels of words, grammar, and mood. And thenthe research has a further study on translation problems and the correspondingsolutions from the perspectives of pragmatics and culture.According to the analysis of comparative text and qualitative research on thecorpus on the functionalist theory basis, the author finds that: 1) on lexical level,Chinese focuses more on emotional words while English on more simple andunderstandable words; 2)on grammatical level, Chinese is written in long sentenceswith a lot of parallel structures, while English uses simple sentences more often; 3) onmood level, Chinese is more formal and full of sensation, while English is morerandom and objective; 4)in view of the characteristics of Chinese and Englishmentioned above, the translation problems can be resolved by the pragmatic andcultural ways.