On C-E Translation Of Publicity-oriented Brochures

Based on the translation of Shanxi Electric Power Corporation Brochures—Building and Promotion of the Integrated and Excellent Corporate Culture, this report intends to reflect on how to make C-E translated brochures clear and concise. English and Chinese are two vastly different languages as they belong to two different language families: Chinese is relatively more abstract than English; Chinese prefers decorative phrases, nouns and four-word structures while English prefers verbs and plain words. Greatly inspired by The Translator’s Guide to Chinglish and other scholars’translation strategies regarding C-E publicity-oriented materials, this paper mainly talked about when to leave off some category nouns and unnecessary modifiers at word or phrase level, and at sentence level, when to replace abstract nouns with verbs so as to make English sentences shorter and clearer, and sometimes even omit some sentences which are not closely related to the context all together. This translation report is meant to offer some approaches to avoid word-for-word translation from Chinese to English so as to produce more readable and idiomatic English versions in translating publicity-oriented brochures.