A Study Of The English Translation Of The Website Profiles Of Jiangsu Universities-from The Perspective Of Peter Newmark’s Text Type Theory

With the remarkable growth of China’s economy, more and more countriesthroughout the world begin to recognize China’s development in many aspects, one ofwhich is its higher education industry. Since China has made rapid advances instrengthening its cooperation with overseas universities, golden opportunities areoffered for students both in and outside China to pursue their further education asexchange students, which in turn indicates China’s aspiration of making itsuniversities more competitive and involving in more international co-operations. Thus,university profile, as a window to the outside world, plays vital role in strengthening auniversity’s international prestige. However, the current translations of universityprofiles, though after a long period of careful modifications in language, still havemany problems that cannot be ignored in terms of culture adaptation and text typeprocessing.Speaking of the translations of UWPs in Jiangsu Province, though linguisticallya lot of adjustments have been made to make them more acceptable, there are still lotproblems. Indeed, the linguistic problem is no longer a big issue for the translation ofUWPs in Jiangsu Province. However, in the current UWP translation practice, thetranslator’s way of dealing with the content-form and author-reader relationships isinadequate. As a result, the versions of UWPs in Jiangsu province fails to fullyperform their functions as publicity materials. We all know that university profilesserve as media through which the author can communicate with the target reader, sothe communicative nature of UWP is essential and translators should bear in mind thispoint in translating.The primary purpose of UWP translation is not to seek equivalence in language,but in message between the ST and TT, which is realized on the textual level. Itshould take into account the characteristics of text types and target reader’sexpectations in order to achieve the equivalence in an acceptable way. Therefore, Peter Newmark’s Text Type Theory provides that purpose, providing an insightfulguidance in this regard. Nowadays, many translation scholars have noticed thatlinguistic functions determine the nature of text types, which can be more than onekind. However, it is the dominant function that determines the major type of a text.This thesis, by resorting to comparative analyses, discusses the stylistic differences ofUWPs between eleven211universities in Jiangsu Province and four universities inEnglish speaking countries. In addition, this qualitative study also probes into thetranslations of Jiangsu UWPs in terms of the three text type functions with the aim ofproviding feasible methods of UWP translation so that the TT can be readily accepted.Through this research, it can be found that translations of web-site profiles of "211Project" institutions in Jiangsu Province fail to transfer the communicative nature ofthe source text since they are predominantly much too expressive and vocative infunction. in the TT. Thus, in translating UWPs, translators must begin with studyingthe target culture and the reader’s expectation and then choose the proper functions tocorrespond with them. This thesis, by focusing on the communicative principle,proposes some detailed methods under the category of semantic and communicativetranslations (core concepts in Newmark’s text type theory) as the macro-framework todescribe and guide UWP translation in Jiangsu province.