A Project Of Translating Cosmetics Instructions From The Rerspective Of Skopostheorie

With the development of the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has taken a great leap, and comprehensive national strength has been greatly improved. Import and export trade has shown an increasing trend year by year. According to WTO Secretariat preliminary statistics, in2013China has become the world’s largest nation in trading goods. Cosmetic instructions play an important role in international trade. The translation effect of instructions directly influences potential consumers, so more and more cosmetic companies have started to focus on translation of instructions. However, the existence of unsightly translation flaws is not conducive to establishing brand image, and must be resolved.This report is based on the instructions of famous cosmetic brands, totaling approximately15,000words of translation project. We select the appropriate Chinese texts and English texts, in the guidance of skopostheorie and text typology, and summarize the differences between the corresponding texts. Translators need to adjust for language features and writing styles accordingly and adhere to the skopos rule, coherence rule, and fidelity rule. The author suggests corresponding translation strategies, such as part of speech conversion, four-character structure, subject change, amplification, adaptation, ellipsis, etc. Finally, by comparing parallel instructions abroad, the author sums six lesions in Chinese cosmetics instruction translation practice, i.e., Chinglish due to abuse of translation software, grammar errors, poor wording, spelling errors, unfaithfulness to original texts, and wrong omissions.