A Study On C-E Translation Of Corporate Profiles From The Perspective Of The German Functionalism

With the development of economic globalization, specially when China entered WTO, China is undertaking ever-increasing economic exchanges with various nations in the world. In the meantime, Chinese corporations have enlarged the circle of international market, and gained more opportunities to enter the international market and take part in the international competition. So, a well translated corporate promotional material contributes to good image of the corporation, promotes the reputation and competitiveness of its products and services, and finally assist the corporation enter into the international market. Corporate profiles display the image of enterprises and offer an information platform for customers or clients, investors and job candidates. Thus corporate profiles as well as their translation play an important role in business activities, which naturally triggers the development of the researches on corporate profile translation.Among modern translation theories in Western countries, the functionalist translation theory proposed by German functionalist breaks through traditional equivalence-based linguistic translation theories and provides a new perspective for translation practice. Taking translation as an action with a given purpose, this theory emphasizes the function of the target text in the target culture. According to this theory, it is the function or the purpose of the target text that determines what translation methods and strategies should be chosen.The author of this thesis takes German Functionalism as his theoretical basis. Authentic and reliable samples of corporate profiles are downloaded from the companies’ websites, constituting a small corpus for the analysis of the general features of the text. Usually, a company profile is regarded as one kind of instructions, which belongs to the informative and vocative material. This kind of material calls for exact use of words, proper expression, and high standard. At the same time, the author also compares and analyzes the differences between Chinese corporate profiles and English corporate profiles in the part of words using, language structure, logical arrangement and information selection. At last, the author explains the causes of differences in the view of ideology, language expression, nationalism, etc.Finally, a conclusion can be drawn that it is feasible to guide the C-E translation of company profiles in the light of Functionalism. The author points out that it is very important to pay attention to the corporate profile translation and avoid the grammatical mistakes during the working. In the meantime, the translator should have a profound knowledge about the differences between the Chinese and English cultures so that he or she can have a better solution during the translation. Furthermore, we should also find out the systematic difference between Chinese and English company profiles in order to avoid word for word translation. At last, we should be acquainted with the discrepancy between two languages so as to adopt the best approach to translation. At the same time, through this small thesis, the author wants to give some inspiration to the translation practice. The author works hard to establish some translation strategies in corporate profiles translation, so as to guide the translation of corporate profiles and to accelerate the development of Chinese corporations.