On Translation Of Chinese Corporate Profiles Based On The Functional Equivalence Theory

Since China’s reform and opening up in1978, the communication andcooperation increase significantly between China and foreign countries,Chinese companies and foreign companies. Under this condition, Chineseenterprises urgently need the English corporate profiles to broadcastthemselves. However, due to the significant increase in the translationneeds and the lack of professional translators, many Chinese companies’profiles are in bad quality. Therefore, the author manages to study thecorporate profiles to provide some practicable strategies for the corporateprofiles translation. Many researches have been done to study thetranslation of Chinese corporate profiles with the qualitative method.However, a few studies are made with the quantitive method.Considering the above factors, the author built a small corpus andtends to study the C-E translation of the Chinese corporate profiles underthe guidance of the Nida’s functional equivalence theory and explore howfunctional equivalence is achieved in translation. The main content ofNida’s functional equivalence theory is the receptors of the message inthe receptor language respond to it in the same or almost the same manneras the receptors in the source language when functional equivalence isachieved in meaning and/or in style. This corpus is made up of56piecesof corporate profiles of28enterprises with28pieces in Chinese and28pieces in English. These enterprises are chosen from the Fortune500companies of2013. So the materials involved in this corpus are real andquality of the translated version is guaranteed.This study combines the qualitative research method and quantitiveanalysis of examples. It not only adopts the corpus-based method toanalyze the features of the corporate profiles, but also analyzes how the functional equivalence is achieved both in meaning and in style on lexical,syntactic and discourse levels in the translation of Chinese corporateprofiles. The author summarizes many strategies that could be adopted toachieve equivalence in meaning and style and provides some suggestionsfor future translation of the corporate profiles.