A Study On Translation Strategies Of Corporate Profiles From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With rapid development of Chinese economy, many companies have the opportunity to enter the world market. Corporate profiles play a crucial role in publicizing the company’s products and services, promoting their international images and attracting more customers and investors. Though more and more Chinese companies realize the importance of translating their corporate profiles into English, some translation problems are frequently detected. They include spelling mistakes, misuse of words, ungrammatical sentences and redundancy. In view of this, it is necessary to do some researches on translation strategies of corporate profiles.The study on the translation of Chinese corporate profiles has made some achievements in recent years. Researches have been done from the perspectives of linguistics, inter-culture and functionalism. Studies from linguistic and inter-cultural perspectives mainly concentrate on some specific aspects and are not comprehensive. Under functionalism, the purpose of the target text determines the translation process. The source text, regarded as an offer of information, is not paid proper attention to. In essence, translation is an act of communication. Both the intention of the source text and the expectation of the target text readers have to be taken into consideration when we do translation.Relevance theory which views translation as a dual ostensive and inferential interpretation of the source text can shed light on translation. Relevance theory was proposed by D.Sperber and D.Wilson in 1986. In their point of view, relevance is a function of cognitive effort and contextual effect. Other things being equal, the larger the contextual effect, the higher the relevance; other things being equal, the smaller the cognitive effort, the higher the relevance. Every ostensive communication automatically communicates a presumption of relevance and successful communication is achieved by pursing optimal relevance.In order to explore effective strategies to translate corporate profiles, 62 examples are cited and analyzed. Trough careful study, the following findings are got. Firstly, Chinese and foreign corporate profiles differ in content, language, style and culture. Secondly, translation problems of Chinese corporate profiles are mainly from three aspects: failures at linguistic level, failures at cultural level and failures at pragmatic level. Thirdly, practical translation strategies like literal translation, addition, omission, adaptation are proposed from the following two aspects: to ensure adequate contextual effects and to reduce unnecessary effort.It is hoped that my findings can be used as valuable reference by those who are engaged in the translation of corporate profiles and help them improve their translations. Besides, it is expected to arouse the attention of more scholars to conduct further researches in this field.