A Functional Perspective On Strategies For Translating Chinese Investment Environment Reports Into English

A professionally written report on a city's investment environment is obviously fundamental to the success of attracting investment.In the case discussed in this paper,many investment environment reports written in Chinese need to be translated into English for the purpose of attracting foreign investors,making the quality professional translation of such reports a key issue confronting all translators in this area.Based on a case study of author's experience as a team member in translating from Chinese into English two investment environment reports of,respectively,Anqing city in Anhui Province and Yancheng city in Jiangsu Province,this paper proposes and discusses three tentative strategies,in terms of linguistic fluency,information accuracy,and logical emphasis,for quality assurance of such translation projects by focusing on the three intended purposes of an investment environment report in accordance with the skopos theory.The author hopes that the discussion in this paper will provide some useful ideas for other translators of similar texts,and for future studies on this topic.The first chapter provides the background information of the translation project discussed and introduces textural,including linguistic,features of investment environment reports.Secondly,by studying on the skopos theory,the author summarizes three general translation purposes: plain language,complete information and clear logic points.Then the author proposes accordingly three general translation strategies: 1.reducing metadiscourse,“slow-starting” words and redundant concepts,so as to avoid redundancy;2.conveying complete information by not adding or deleting at will and explaining hard-tounderstand words;3.highlighting key information by using passive sentences and avoiding ambiguous expressions.