On The Chinese-english Translation Of Corporate Profiles From Skopostheorie Perspective

With the quicker proceeding of the economic globalization and deeper adoption of China's reform and open policy, the economic contact between China and the other countries in the world has been becoming closer and closer. As the most important unit in the economic activity, the corporate, in order to enter the world market and merge with the world economy, not only needs the high-quality product and good service, but also requires excellent publicizing measures. Corporate profile is one of the corporate publicizing measures, the purpose of which is to establish a favorable corporate image, promote its products or/and services and improve its competitiveness in the market. So is the purpose of the Chinese-English translation of corporate profile. However, when reading the English translated versions of the domestic corporate profiles, the author finds the quality of translated versions is far from satisfaction because of the prevalent translation problems and errors in word diction, sentence structure and style. Therefore, it is significant for improving the quality of translated version of corporate profile and achieving the purpose of C-E translation of corporate profile to summarize these translation problems and errors, analyze their causes and propose the solutionBased on Skopostheorie, this study, after describing the functions and purposes of corporate profile, is conducted to explore the characteristics of Chinese and English corporate profiles from linguistic and cultural respective by comparing translated versions with the parallel texts. Taking the Chinese and English translated texts of 30 Chinese corporate profiles collected by the author as the research subject, the study continues to exemplify those translation problems and errors as follows: 1) lexical level: spelling mistakes, poor diction and word redundancy; 2) syntactic level: poor structure and dangling modifiers; 3) cultural level: prevalent political jargons and those titles and awards translated by word-for-word method. Then, the study analyzes the causes of those translation problems and errors and points out they are ignoring the publicizing purpose of the corporate profile, neglecting expected target-text readers and pursuing the formal equivalence between target text and source text blindly, besides of the translators'language incompetence. Lastly, through concrete examples, the author suggests three main translation methods to solve these problems and errors, namely, addition, deletion and restructuring.A conclusion can be drawn that Skopostheorie can be applied to guide the Chinese-English translation of corporate profiles. During the process of translation, the translator, taking the characteristics of corporate profile in English-speaking country as a reference, should start from the perspective of target readers. At the same time, he or she should take into consideration their social and cultural backgrounds and determine his or her own appropriate translation strategies according to the purpose of C-E translation of corporate profile in order to produce the translated texts acceptable to target readers.