Features Of Accounting English And Its Translation Guided By Skopos Theory

As the language of business, accounting plays an important role in the world of modern business. Since China has open its door towards globalization, accounting English is much more important for our country's economy. In this thesis, Vermeer's skopos theory and Newmark's semantic and communicative translation method has been used to study accounting English. In skopos theory, the purpose (skopo) of translation plays a crucial role in the process of choosing translation methods and the readership of target texts is an important factor that determines the purpose of each particular translation activity. In the English-Chinese translation of accounting English, the purpose is to reproduce accounting English texts quickly and accurately, in a way that Chinese readers can understand easily. Besides, the translation theorist Peter Newmark developed two translation methods semantic translation method and communicative translation method. At the same time, he classified texts into three types: informative texts, expressive texts and communicative texts. Under this classification, accounting English belongs to informative texts and so communicative translation method is more proper than semantic translation method in the process of English-Chinese translation of accounting English. Then as a kind of English for special purpose, accounting English possesses its unique lexical, syntactical and rhetorical features. For its lexical features, accounting English contains a lot of abbreviations and terminologies; for its syntactical features, accounting English uses a great of passive sentences and complex sentences; for its rhetorical features, rhetorical devices seldom appear in accounting English texts and sentences are usually in present tense. After studying these features, this thesis suggests some concrete translation skills for its English-Chinese translation under the guidance of skopos theory and communicative translation method. For the translation of technical terms, there is not many skills and translators only need to memorize and understand accounting terminologies; for the translation of non-technical terms, four main translation skills are addition, omission, extended meaning and conversion of parts of speech; for the translation of passive sentences, the majority of passive voice need to be change into active voice and others keeps the original passive voice, but in seldom cases the passive verbs may change into other parts of speech; for the translation of complex sentences, the original main sentences and clause sentences are always divided into short sentences and the arrangement of sense groups may change.