Functionalist Approaches To The Translation Of Products' Instructions

With the rapid growth of China's marketing economy, translators encounter a large variety of translations of pragmatic texts such as propaganda materials for travels, advertisements, products'instructions. In recent years, many foreign-made products, especially electronic, medical, and make-up products, sweep into our domestic market. In order to draw the attention of Chinese consumers and take predominance in the market, apart from the products'quality itself, the quality of the translation of products'instructions also exerts a great influence on consumers'safety and purchasing desire. A well-translated instruction not only provides detailed information about products, but also gives audience aesthetic appealing and inspires consumers'purchasing desire to buy the products.Functionalist approaches, put forward in 1970s by some German scholars including Katharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz Manttari, and Christiane Nord, shed light on the translation of products'instructions. This theory emphasizes the functionality of the target text in the target culture. It suggests that translation is the production of a functional target text maintaining a relationship with a given source text that is specified according to the intended or demanded function of the target text. In this model, the source text serves as only "an offer of information" from which a translator selects the items he or she finds interesting and important to reach the intended goal. Functionalist approaches to translation have opened up a new perspective to translation studies. It provides a theoretical basis for some unconventional translation strategies.The paper bases its discussion on instructions and their translation, in particular, borrowing a strong support from the functionalist approaches to translation in German academia. Hence, there are three main parts in elaboration. First, the paper demonstrates the features of instructions, giving the definition and classification of instructions and analyzing the stylistic features on both lexical and syntactic levels. Second, the paper gives more touches to the strategies of English-Chinese translation of products'instructions. Taking functionalist approaches as the theoretical basis, the paper introduces academic views of such advocates of functionalist approaches as Katharina Reiss, Hans. J. Vermeer, Christiane Nord and brings up the concepts like "Skopostheorie","Translation Brief',"Function Plus Loyalty",etc. This theory, together with the features of products'instructions provides a forceful guidance to the principles, criteria and techniques of the translation of products'instructions. Finally, abundant examples are given and analyzed in this part, and rules and suggestions are put forward from four different aspects—information providing, aesthetics, culture and vocative aspect. And the translator should equip himself with certain responsibilities and abilities demanded by the challenging sphere of instructions translation. But in all, they are Skopos-oriented.