A Report On Translation Of Cosmetic Instructions Under The Guidance Of The Skopos Theory

As one of the major consumer countries,China is a big market that international cosmetic companies are eager to take a share.How to introduce their cosmetics to Chinese consumers and stimulate consumption is the problem that these companies must solve.Product instructions are the most direct and detailed introduction to consumers.Unfortunately,due to lingual and cultural differences between China and English-speaking countries,literal translation usually fails to achieve the desired effect,or even worse,it has the opposite effect.Compared with other pragmatic translation,domestic studies on the translation of imported cosmetic instructions are not sufficient.Therefore,the translation of the imported cosmetics instructions and the corresponding studies are of great importance.Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer,the German functionalist translation theorists,put forward Skopos Theory,asserting that the purpose of translation determines the method of translation,that is,the result determines the method.Featured with skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule,Skopos Theory is expected to exert an important guiding role in the translation practice of cosmetic instruction texts which are aimed to clarify product information and to promote sales as well.This report mainly discusses the translation of cosmetic instructions from the perspective of Skopos Theory.Based on the instructions of Kiehl's Series Cosmetics,the present study selects approximately 15,000 words in English manuals of 50 best-selling Kiehl's products as the research object.This translation practice report consists of five parts:task description,process description,theory overview,case study and conclusion.Conducted in chapter 4,the case study is the core of the report.in which the author analyzes translation strategies from six dimensions of vocabulary,syntax,discourse,graphology,consumer psychology and aesthetic psychology,based on features of the source texts and the fidelity rulet coherence rule and skopos rule,so as to systematically investigate the problems in the translation process and provide the corresponding solutions.This research shows that Skopos Theory has strong guiding significance to the English-Chinese translation practice of cosmetic instruction text.Guided by the three basic rules,the translator detects the suitable translation strategies in the process of the translation,and improves the quality of translation,thus realizing the major purposes of cosmetic instructions:to clarify information,to satisfy aesthetic needs,and to promote sales.