Functionalist Approaches To C-E Company Profile Translation

With the development of globalization and China’s boom in economy, China is carrying on ever-increasing economic exchanges with almost all countries in the world. Facing this situation, more and more Chinese enterprises have taken advantage of this great opportunity to expand their business into the international market by setting up their web pages, usually with its English-translated version, on the Internet. An effective company profiles translation has two functions—the informative function and the appellative function. It can project good corporation images, promote products or services selling, and improve the competitiveness in the international market.However, the status quo of company profiles translation is far from satisfaction. Due to word-for-word translation method which would often result in large number of mistakes, most of the English materials neglect the language norms, thinking mode and cultural differences, thus the translation versions cannot achieve their intended functions and even worse, may undermine the image of companies. It can be argued that the traditional translation strategies guided by equivalence-base translation theory are not suitable to the translation of company profiles. With the German functionalist approach being introduced into China from1990s, many translators applied functional approaches in the pragmatic translation. In this thesis, the author tries to approach the problems from functionalist approaches, endeavors to prove that functional theory of translation can provide powerful insights into company promotion texts translation.The study, with functionalist approaches as its theoretical framework, is undertaken to explore the linguistic and cultural features of English and Chinese company profiles by comparing translated texts with the parallel texts in the target language after explaining the purpose and functions of company profiles. This thesis attempts to define and classify the problems from functionalist approaches perspective, then apply the translation-oriented text analysis model to the translation of a sample text, taking into account of the text composition and text functions. Based on the practical analysis, it’s proved that Nord’s model is applicable to the translation of corporate promotion texts and some suggestions for rethinking translation of the so-called promotion texts.Finally, a conclusion can be drawn that it is feasible to guide the C-E translation of company profiles in the light of functionalist approaches. Considering that Chinese and English company promotion materials differ in language norms, and that source text and target text addressee have very different cultural knowledge, translators are expected to take the ultimate purpose of the text in mind and make some adaptation so as to produce a version that is comprehensible and acceptable to the target reader.It’s expected that the present study will be of some help for the improvement of the company profiles translations in Guangxi even in the whole country and the development of the enterprise translation in both theory and practice.