On C-E Translation Strategies Of Banking Corporate Social Responsibility Reports From The Perspective Of Translation Variation Theory

Corporate social responsibility(CSR)reporting is often seen as an effective tool to construct a positive corporate image and corporate identity,as a result of the current awareness of environmental and social issues across the globe.Targeted at a broad range of stakeholders ranging from customers,shareholders,employees,government to the community,it provides information about a company's social and environmental performance.In line with the globalized trend,Chinese listed companies have begun to disclose the bilingual CSR reports.The English CSR reporting is often translated from Chinese version;however,the English version of such reporting is primarily not with high quality and readability,which will to some extent hinder Chinese enterprises from going global.High-quality translation reports cannot live without appropriate translation strategies.Thus,studies on Chinese-English(C-E)translation strategies of CSR reports can not only contribute to improving the translation quality,but also have practical significance for constructing a positive corporate image and enhancing corporate promotional effects.Based on translation variation theory by Huang Zhonglian(2002),this thesis probes into C-E translation variation strategies of banking CSR reports to improve the translation quality and text readability.Using a corpus of 23 Chinese and English sample pairs of 2017-2018 banking CSR reports from 12 top Chinese banks on The Banker's “2018 Top 1000 World Banks” list,this study first identifies the specific and linguistic features of the banking CSR reports through text analysis.Then the thesis explores the suitable translation variation strategies and how they are employed to translate the featured text through case analyses.The results reveal that the specific features of banking CSR reports mainly include a letter from leaders,mission and value statements,CSR engagement with stakeholders in which key facts and figures,tables and graphs measure their efforts,assurance statements,as well as surveys and interviews.The language feature can be divided into lexical and syntactic aspects.On the lexical level,it is manifested as numeral abbreviations,entailment,category words,and intensifiers.On the syntactic level,no-subject sentences and long sentences with verb clauses are frequently seen in the reports.From the macroscopic perspective,translation editing,selective translation and translation rearrangement can be effectively used to address such text translation as company profile,CSR strategy,as well as awards and recognition respectively.From the microscopic perspective,addition,deletion,combination,and reordering play a crucial role in the adoption of the above translation variation strategies in the C-E banking CSR reports.These translation variation strategies and techniques give top priority to the target readers' needs and translators' creativity,thus producing better translation effects and quality.The current study aims to enrich the literature in translation variation theory and have implications for CSR reporting translation.