A Study Of The Model For Comparing Parallel Texts And Its Application In The English Translation Of Chinese Company Profiles

Integrating into the process of economic globalization, Chinese companies, large and small, have been competing for access to the international market by attracting foreign investments and investing abroad. In order to attract potential customers, expand foreign exchange and cooperation, and find inroad into the international market, Chinese companies have set up web pages that introduce their products and services in English. Unfortunately, most of these English pages’contents are direct translation from Chinese pages, which is problematic regarding information processing, layout, cultural norms, and linguistic norms. Such problems, which will undermine the effectiveness of information dissemination, must not go unheeded by the translators.This thesis attempts to make a corpus-based comparative study of Chinese texts of Chinese company profiles and English texts of American company profiles. On the basis of Werlich’s theory of text grammar, a model for comparing parallel texts is proposed and its application in the English translation of Chinese company profiles is demonstrated. Using this model, this thesis analyses and elaborates the similarities and differences between Chinese company profiles and American company profiles in textual conventions. The findings are then used as guidelines for translating Chinese company profiles into English. It is argued that the model for comparing parallel texts can be adopted in non-literary translation practice and teaching.The thesis has built three small corpuses with the English web profiles from25large American companies and both Chinese and English web profiles from25large Chinese companies. Based on these corpuses, this thesis, using both qualitative and quantitative analyses,1) studies the differences of the Chinese texts, translated texts, and English texts in lexicon, rhetoric, sentence structure, sentence length and number of words, and decides the quality of the translation texts;2) uses Werlich’s text grammar as a guideline for comparing the Chinese texts of Chinese company profiles and the English texts of American company profiles in terms of text contents, text structures, cultural norms and linguistic norms, and proposes the strategies for translating Chinese company profiles into English.Through the study and comparison, this thesis discovers that1) at the level of text content, Chinese company profiles are relatively long and contain a wide range of information, trying to cover everything; while American company profiles tend to cover all necessary information with shorter texts;2) at the level of text structure, Chinese company profiles are random in layout except that the opening and closing paragraphs are mostly of fixed contents; while American company profiles are rather predicable in layouts;3) at the level of cultural norms, both company profiles display their own logic, codes of conduct and values. Chinese company profiles contain a lot of Chinese characteristic expressions that require delicacy when translating;4) Chinese company profiles and American company profiles use different rhetoric. The latter uses the first person "we" most of the time; while the former uses the third person. Chinese texts have longer sentences and tend to favor literary elegance builds; whereas English texts are of shorter sentences and characterized by advertisement language;5) with the above differences summarized, the problems regarding translation can be solved at the pragmatics and cultural level.