On C-E Translation Of Online Company Profiles In Chinese Multinational Companies:Problem Analysis And Solutions

The internet has become an important platform for enterprise international publicity in the information explosion era. As a sketch of a company, a company profile plays a significant role in enterprise international publicity. Most Chinese multinational companies now have created websites of English versions, but there are still many problems found in company profile translation.The thesis carries out an analysis of the texts of Chinese multinational companies under the guidance of Nord’s text analysis model, through which the author understands the extratextual and intratextual factors influencing decisions about the translation strategies or methods in the translation process. The source text analysis and then its comparison with the translation brief enable the translator to identify the difficulties in the translation process. Basing on that, the author is able to find the problems in the company profile translation of Chinese multinational companies. The corpus is comprised of thirty Chinese company profiles and their English versions selected at random from the top100Chinese multinational companies. Also a comparison with some famous corporations from British and America is made in order to find out the differences in the language style, cultural values, and text structure, etc.Through observation and analysis of the collected corpus, the author finds that the problems in Chinese multinational companies are as follows: Firstly, the lack of timely update leads to the inconsistence of objective information in the Chinese company profile and its English version. Secondly, there exist some trivial errors such as grammar mistakes, poor diction, and etc. which may be caused by the translator’s incompetence or his or her irresponsible attitude toward the translation of company profile. Thirdly, some redundant and excessively detailed information is included in a company profile, which leads to a text with long paragraphs. Lastly, translators of the company profiles are inclined to list all the awards and titles and a company profile tends to contain many descriptions relevant to political information.For these problems, the author offers some target text-oriented translation methods such as amplification, omission, and restructuring to achieve the intended function of the target text. Also some inspirations are gained. For example, the translator who is involved in the translation practice of company profiles should raise the target readership awareness and switch his or her role in translation process, rather than merely play a role of language decoder.By and large, company profile translation is a process which is seemingly simple yet complicated enough, for it is in a sense a cross-cultural activity. The translators has to find out what information in the source text should be kept invariant and what has to be adjusted or deleted in accordance with the translation purpose. Besides, they are also required to understand the cultural psychology of the target readers. It can be seen that company profile translation is more than transfer which takes place purely between languages. Instead, it is a switch of aesthetics and cultural values between source language and target language.