C-E Translation Of Life Insurance Policies From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Life insurance has been playing an important role in our lives. Insurancesector in China is booming these years. Many foreign insurancecompanies have come to China and some of them are occupying asignificant quota in the insurance market, especially in first-tier citiessuch as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Tens of thousands offoreigners are now working or studying in china, who are in need ofbeing covered by insurance policies. Domestic companies and foreigninsurance companies face severe competition among themselves andbetween each other. They need to understand each other and learn fromeach other to improve their own services. Individuals need to compareshop to decide where to get life insurance product they need. Therefore,the translation of insurance policies is inevitable in this field. Of course, itis a painstaking process, involving various elements such as linguistics，marketing, culture etc. Therefore, it demands a systematic study.Functionalist approach focuses on the target of translation, which stressesthe functionality of the target text in the target culture．Under theguidance of this theory, the translators are supposed to make full use ofvarious sources of information and they have a say to choose whatevertranslation strategies they recon appropriate to achieve the expected resultof translation tasks. This approach to translation views the translationstudy from a new angle, whose unique contribution to translation study is that it enriches the theory of translation criteria through the perspective ofthe function and the objective of the target text as the decisive criterion ofall translations．The present research is to study translation of insurance policies based onSkopstheorie. The task of insurance policy translation is complicated andmulti-faceted. However, the translated insurance policies must beacceptable and understandable in the Target culture because of the natureof insurance companies to make profits.Life insurance companies in China do not have a long history comparedwith its counterparts. The study or practice in this field is also scarce.Thus, the translation of life insurance polices is different from and moredifficult than the translation in other fields. Not only linguistics andpsychology, but also marketing and business must be taken into account.In light of functionalist approach and Skopostheorie, the thesis is trying toexplain how the theory can help in life insurance policy translation andtrying to improve translation of insurance polices, which, to some extent,promote the development of insurance, esp. life insurance section, inChina.