An Analysis Of Translation Errors Of School Profile On English Webpages Of China’s Universities:Functionalist Approaches

With the increasing development of internationalization and informationization of higher education in China, the webpages of colleges and universities have been the window to show their overall strengths and enhance their prestige. Nowadays, most of the webpages are presented in two versions---Chinese and English. It is no doubt that the English version plays an increasingly important role in the international academic exchanges and cooperation, the international cooperatively-run schools and the education of the foreign students. However, because of the differences between Chinese and English, there are different standards in the translation quality, thus it influences the publicity aims of China’s universities.From the perspective of functionalist approaches, this study chooses the "school profile" on the English webpages of China’s universities as research materials, and discusses the problems existing on the webpages. As the English webpages are mostly translated from the Chinese versions, the existing problems can be called as "translation errors" in accordance with the functionalist approaches. Based on the approaches, the texts of Chinese webpages are seen as the source texts and the English webpage texts are regarded as the target texts. By adopting Skopostheorie and the Theory of Translational Action, and combining with the principles of intercultural communication, the present study makes a qualitative study of the translation errors existing in the target texts from the linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and text-specific levels.This study selects15domestic universities as research objects and15overseas universities for reference. Firstly, the author makes a comparative analysis of the "school profile" between the Chinese and English versions of China’s universities. According to the research findings, the pragmatic translation errors include retaining the useless information, deleting or simplifying the useful information and incorrect or insufficient information as a result of lagged update. The translation errors at the cultural level are mainly in three aspects:lacking of necessary annotation to the culture-specific phenomena of source texts, conflicts of different values and worldviews and retaining the information related to political ideology. As for the linguistic translation errors, the current study principally discusses them from lexical and syntactic levels, including wrong usage of words and phrases, inflexible correspondence, improper collocation, impolitic wordiness and information and improper sentence structure, etc. The text-specific translation errors are discussed based on the characteristics of the communicative medium of the webpages---the Internet.Moreover, the author utilizes UAM Corpus Tool to summarize the distribution characteristics of all the translation errors on the English webpages of the selected domestic universities, and conducts a detailed analysis. And then aiming at the above-listed problems, the author discusses the main factors which cause the translation errors.Finally, the author draws a conclusion of what has been found in this study. The translator should do the translations from the viewpoint of the target readers, so that they can achieve the anticipated function of the target texts, and reach the aims of communication and cooperation of China’s universities. And then the author discusses the implications of the current study for further improvement of the English webpage qualities of domestic universities, and also lists the limitations of the research.