A Study Of E-C Translation Of Male Cosmetics Instructions

Cosmetics are considered to be necessities in every human being’s daily life, and whether you are male or female, child or senior citizen; no one can lead a life in a place where there are no cosmetics being around. When people purchase cosmetics, the instructions of the product become the most important reference tool. As a group of newly emerging cosmetics, male cosmetics have taken their own position in the whole cosmetics market, and it is increasingly popular for men to buy themselves cosmetics. In China, most of the male cosmetics are imported from western countries and then, whether the translation text of the English male cosmetics can replicate the original promotional function and stimulate potential buyers’ interest and induce them to buy the product finally has become one of the central problems to be solved.With a combination of quantitative and quantitative methods, this thesis analyzes50English cosmetics instructions and their parallel Chinese cosmetics instructions collected from the Internet and market in China, America and Thailand. Based on the ESP school’s genre analysis theory put forward by Swales and V. K. Bhatia, this thesis tries to explore the communicative goals of the genre, and genre similarities and differences between the two kinds of texts. Furthermore, Peter Newmark’s text typology is employed to exploit the text type and function of male cosmetics instructions. In the end, the study findings from the above two perspectives are integrated for the purpose of giving suggestions on approaches and strategies to be taken in the translating process.V. K. Bhatia, the representative of ESP genre analysis school, made some studies on the structure features of promotional genres. On this basis, male cosmetics instructions can be described as the result of a series of conventionalized communicative purposes. They own relatively fixed structures and have the functions of providing information and promoting products sales. Research shows that in general, the male cosmetics instructions are composed by the moves below:identifying the cosmetics, introducing the cosmetics, instructing the cosmetics usage/storage/caution, listing cosmetics content, providing quality assurance certificate and informing the manufacturer’s information. Each move above consists of one to several small steps. A comparative analysis of these moves and steps shows that the English and Chinese male cosmetics instructions have a lot of similarities and differences in genre structure and linguistic strategies, like different move sequences, lexicon styles and sentence patterns. Meanwhile, with the application of Peter Newmark’s text typology, this thesis finds out that the male cosmetics instructions are characterized by its multiple functions as follows: the information function of informing customers of the cosmetics details; the vocative function of stimulating buyers’ consuming desire and the aesthetic function of pleasing purchasers’ senses. These three functions supplement and reinforce each other in the texts, and they can all be manifested by almost every part of the instructionsStudies show that translation errors in the Chinese translation of English male cosmetics instructions usually occur on the following levels:the linguistic level, the functional level and the cultural level. After analyzing the errors, this thesis puts forward some basic principles to be complied with during the E-C translating process of male cosmetics instructions:the fidelity principle and the readability-oriented principle. These principles help to maintain the functional equivalence between the ST and the TT. With a comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences of the discourse structure and linguistic strategies between the English texts and Chinese versions, the communicative translation strategy, which aims at reproducing the source text’s function in the target text, can be realized through adopting translation approaches as omission, addition, borrowing and adaption. Through these methods the target text can be more professional and standardized and then the overall male cosmetics instructions translation industry and the market of male cosmetics sales are promoted.