Translating English Furniture Product Catalogs Into Chinese: Challenges And Solutions

As a result of China's booming real estate market,furniture production has witnessed a rapid development in recent years,and more international furniture brands are making vigorous efforts to operate in the lucrative Chinese market.To successfully introduce their products to this market,furniture manufacturers need to provide informative and attractive product catalogs written in or translated into Chinese.Hence an increasing demand for English-Chinese translations of furniture product catalogs.This paper aims to discuss the challenges that translators may encounter when translating English furniture product catalogs into Chinese,and propose appropriate solutions based on a case study.As far as the informative and vocative functions of furniture product catalogs are concerned,four challenges are generally faced with by translators,to which possible solutions are put forward and discussed in this paper.Firstly,search engines provide a useful tool for translators to ensure correct and standard rendering of technical terms that are specific to furniture production in the specific contexts.Secondly,to properly translate the large number of fancy modifiers and descriptions of the products involved,translators should be aware of the redundancy or over exaggeration problems caused by repeated use of unnecessary adjectives and/or pompous expressions.Thirdly,when emphasizing the products' user experience which may be hard to depict in written words,a translator should pay more attention to use specific and vivid expressions rather than flowery phrasings or abstract implications.Fourthly,when the forms of expression of original texts may not be as compelling for Chinese customers as they are for the original audience,translators should rearrange the sentences or paragraph in a proper way so as to make them more easily understandable in the Chinese context.