The E-C Translation Of Cosmetic Instructions: A Skopostheorie Perspective

Since international communications become increasingly frequent and foreigncosmetics are popular in China, market demands high-level translation of cosmeticinstructions. In the meantime, the translation of cosmetic instructions in present market isfar from satisfactory, which makes the research on this kind of translation more urgent andnecessary that ever. This study aims to analyse the English-to-Chinese translation ofcosmetic instructions from the perspective of Skopostheorie.Skopostheorie, which regards translation as an action with certain purposes, and itsthree rules, namely, skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule, lay a solid theoreticalfoundation for this thesis. In addition, Reiss’s text typology are also applied to the analysisof the study. In light of Reiss’s text typology, cosmetic instructions used in this paper arecategorized into content-focused texts, form-focused texts and appeal-focused texts. Sinceeach type of texts have intended functions, different translating methods for each type oftexts are put forward in order to sustain their intended functions. All translating methodssuggested by the author, such as literal translation, addition, omission and adaption, aremade in line with Skopostheorie and its three rules and the effectiveness of those methodsare checked by a case study. The study proves the effectiveness of Skopostheorie inguiding the translation of cosmetic instructions.