A Study On C-E Translation Of Corporate Promotional Materials From A Skopostheorie Perspective

With the rapid development of economic globalization and China’s reform andopening up, more and more Chinese enterprises are entering the international markets.Serviced as the bond of communication between Chinese companies and foreignconsumers or cooperators, C-E translation of corporate promotional materialsgradually attracts the public attention.Taking the purpose of expanding the enterprises’ influence, the informative,communicative and vocative functions of corporate promotional materials endow itstranslation with specificities. Due to differences between Chinese and English as wellas Chinese and western cultures, there are many distinctions in lexical, syntactical,textual and promotion focuses aspects between Chinese and English discourses,which caused the problems of Chinglish, improper translation and even disabletranslation existing in C-E translation of corporate promotional materials.Been deemed as the most significant theory in German functionalist translationschool, Skopos Theory put forward three translation rules: skopos rule, coherence ruleand fidelity rule. As the top-ranking rule, skopos rule holds that translation processshould be determined by its skopos. That is, the end justifies the means; and thetranslation methods and strategies adopted in the process of a transition should beunder the guidance of the expected purpose or intended functions. Except for thesource text, initiator, translation brief, translator and target-text receiver should betaken into consideration in the process of translation. All these concepts proposed bySkopostheorie conform to the theoretical needs in C-E translation of corporatepromotional materials naturally and provide the research with a new perspective.Based on above discussion, this paper tries to carry out a comprehensive study onC-E translation of corporate promotional materials in light of Skopostheorie. Bystudying and analyzing thirty Chinese corporate promotional materials together withtheir English version which are selected from the homepages of Chinese enterpriseswhich have been listed in Fortune500Companies and in Chinese Top500Foreign Trade Enterprises, the author finds out C-E translation of corporate promotionalmaterials is mainly effected by linguistic and cultural factors, and the proportion ofadopted literal translation, free translation, addition, deletion, reconstruction andconnotation. Then, through the qualitative research of this thesis, the author proposesthe main translation principles of translating the main message, readability, equalpragmatic function as well as aesthetic principle, and explains the methods andfunctions of adopting literal translation, free translation, addition, deletion,reconstruction and connotation by giving specific examples with the aim of improvingC-E translation of corporate promotional materials from the perspective ofSkopostheorie.The last part starts with a summary of this thesis, and the limitations of this studyas well as the suggestions for future researches are also stated.