A Functionalist Approach To The C-e Translation Of Chinese Corporate Profiles On The Websites

With the development of globalization and the popularization of internet, English corporate profile on the company's website has been considered as an effective channel for building up favorable corporate image and promoting business in overseas markets. However, most English corporate profiles of Chinese companies are the word-for-word literal translation of the Chinese profile texts, failing to take into account the customary expressions of the target language as well as target readers'cultural background and their mode of thinking. These versions fail to achieve a satisfactory effect. Although some problems lying in the translation of corporate profiles have appealed academic researches, most of the studies stay at lexical and syntactic analysis and hardly provide any systematic guidance to translators in the field. With the German functionalist approach being introduced into China since 1990s, many translators applied Skopos theory in the translation of corporate profile texts. In light of this translation theory, this thesis attempts to use functionalist approaches as the theoretical framework to study C-E corporate profile translation.Qualitative analysis is mainly adopted in this research. Thirty authentic and reliable samples of English corporate profiles are downloaded from the companies'websites of the food and beverage industry in China and America, constituting a small corpus for the analysis. The author of this thesis takes German functionalism as her theoretical basis, first introduces the definitions and functions of corporate profiles, and then makes a descriptive and comparative analysis between Chinese and American corporate profiles in terms of textual organizations, linguistic styles and cultural values in order to generalize the audience expectations and language norms of corporate profiles in English-speaking countries. At the same time, it attempts to clarify the situation or problems in translation of corporate profiles from the perspective of functionalist approaches. Based on the case studies and practical analysis, the author has proved that the functionalist approach is applicable to the translation of corporate profile texts. It aims at offering a new perspective in the study of corporate profile translation. Also relevant strategies, mainly"adaptation", are provided for translators to enrich their understanding of corporate profile and facilitate the reader-oriented translations.This thesis concludes that from the functionalist point of view, translation is not merely a linguistic process. Guided by the translation brief and taking into account the translation Skopos and the target addressees'situation, the translator selects certain items from the source-language offer of information and processes them in order to form a new offer of information in the target language. It is the specification of the function of the source text or its elements such as content or structure that permits the translator to decide whether or not these elements are useful or adequate to the desired purpose of the target text.In short, it is urgent to conduct this kind of study. By doing so, the present deficiency of C-E corporate profile translation is revealed and strategies for improvement are proposed so as to transmit accurate information to foreigners and promote international business. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance for this study.