A Functionalist Approach To The C-E Translation Of Publicity Materials Of Chinese Beverage Enterprises

Thanks to a series of encouraging policies,an increasing number of Chinese enterprises are going global and working with foreign enterprises.Qualified and effective English corporate publicity materials has two important functions,namely informative function and operative function,which are bound to assist Chinese enterprises to establish favorable corporate images and promote business in overseas markets.However,the current situation of the C-E translation of corporate publicity materials remains far from satisfaction.A majority of the corporate publicity materials of Chinese enterprises are translated literally,that is to say,translation word by word,sentence by sentence.This kind of translation does not consider the cultural background and thinking mode of target audience,which fails to provide target audience with necessary and appropriate information,not to mention to appeal them to take actions.There is no doubt that traditional translation based on equivalence theory is not suitable to the translation of corporate publicity materials.Since many translators and scholars proved the applicability of functionalist approaches to the pragmatic translation,the author attempts to approach the translation problems and errors with functionalist approaches and provide insights to the C-E translation of corporate publicity materials.Qualitative analysis is mainly adopted in this study.Twenty-five authentic samples of corporate publicity materials are collected from the official websites of the beverage enterprises home and abroad,constituting a small corpus for the analysis.This study first introduces the definition and functions of corporate publicity materials and makes a comparison between translated texts and the parallel texts in the target language to find out the linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese corporate publicity materials and English counterparts.With functionalist approaches as its theoretical framework,this study points out the typical translation problems in the C-E translation of corporate publicity materials of Chinese beverage enterprises and then applies the functionalist top-down translation method to the translation of corporate publicity materials in the case study.Finally,this study concludes that it is feasible and practical to apply functionalist approaches to the C-E translation of corporate publicity materials.Guided by the translation brief,translators analyze the source text and select certain items from the source text and process them so as to form a target text comprehensible and acceptable to target audience,during which language norms and cultural knowledge of target audience should be taken into consideration.In short,under the guidance of functionalist theories,this study reveals the deficiency of the C-E translation of corporate publicity materials of Chinese beverage enterprises and proposes some practical strategies to improve the translation,so as to provide accurate information and appeal expected actions.