The Acceptability Of The English Versions Of Chinese University’s Profile In Jiangxi Province:a Skopostheorie Perspective

Along with development of globalization, the academic contacts between universities at home and abroad have witnessed a steady rise due to the remarkable progress in Chinese advanced education, and more and more overseas students come to study in China. Under this circumstance, in order to enhance their public images and seek for international communication and cooperation in wider areas, many universities have presented homepages in English versions. However, most of the English versions are selected and translated from the Chinese versions directly. Many scholars point out these English homepages fail to achieve their functions. As an important window for external publicity, it is extremely necessary for these universities to have highly qualified English homepages.The author collected and analyzed six copies of universities’profiles in Jiangxi province in May2010, of which are Nanchang University, East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang Hangkong University, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute. The author finds that there are various problems and errors in their English translation, including grammatical ones, syntactic ones and Chinglish and so on. In the next three months, to investigate the authenticity of the English profiles, the author does a questionnaire and an interview among some native speakers, relating the acceptability of English homepages of some universities’profiles in Jiangxi. The result shows that from inductive analysis the general responses from the native speakers are understandable but unacceptable about the profiles.Therefore, the author is trying to indicate some major problems in rendering Chinese university’s profile and analyze the unacceptability of the English versions of universities’profiles in Jiangxi province from the perspective of Skopostheorie. Given some concrete examples, this thesis puts forward some translation strategies in the purpose of improving the translation quality.Firstly, this thesis adopts Vermeer’s Skopostheorie to discuss the Acceptability through comparative analysis of the parallel texts concerning universities’profiles at home and abroad.(of which four British and American universities, six universities in China) The author compares the differences and similarities from language and structure perspectives. Secondly, the author analyzes the unacceptable aspects of the English versions of some Chinese universities’profiles from language, culture and communication perspectives. Through contrastive study, the author discovers that the domestic university profiles reflect poor acceptability, for example, redundancy, Chinglish, improper cultural information processing, and lack of timely updating. Finally, the author provides improved translation versions and puts forward some corresponding strategies for reference. As to the aspect of translation strategy, the author makes suggestion that the university’s profile abroad could be taken as reference text on the foundation of Skopostheorie. The translation strategies proposed by the author concerning the translation of Chinese university’s profile are amplification, omission, and restructuring.In conclusion, translation is not merely a linguistic process, the translation purpose and the target readers should also be taken into consideration, and then the translator should select information from the original texts. 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.