Chinese Corporate Profiles Translation: A German Functionalist Perspective

Ruixue MA

Abstract


With the trend of economic globalization, more and more Chinese companies are using bilingual webpage as a new channel to penetrate into international markets. Online English corporate profiles play a very important role in the establishment of a company’s public image on international economic stages. However the quality of C-E translation is far from satisfactory as a result of ignoring target readers’ habit of expression and cultural differences, which has a negative impact on the penetration of Chinese products into international markets. Based on 24 authentic and reliable samples of corporate profiles, the paper analyzes the Chinese corporate profiles’ different features from that of companies of English speaking countries and classifies the translation errors into three categories: pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors and linguistic translation errors. Error samples and suggested versions are given to analyze the types and causes of errors. With the German functionalist approaches as its framework, the paper puts forward some strategies to avoid the translation errors and improve the C-E translation quality of Chinese corporate profiles.
Key words: Functionalist approaches; Corporation profiles; Translation strategies; Skopostheorie

References


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