A Report On The C-E Translation Of University Website News Under The Guidance Of The Skopos Theory

In the growth of world-class universities and world-class disciplines,the university English website serves as a window for overseas audiences to learn about the school-running characteristics,development trends,and campus culture.It serves as a vital window for universities’ external publicity,aids in the dissemination of sophisticated culture,and helps enhance the universities’ reputation and promote international exchanges and cooperation.The author of this report was entrusted by the Psychological Research and Consulting Center of Southwest Jiaotong University to translate some web news about conferences and lectures,achievements of faculty and students,and important announcements.The 15 pieces of news selected for this report were released from September 2019 to December 2021,with a total of about 22,000 characters.The report offers a historical review of the Skopos theory at home and abroad and its application to translation.Then the report marshals the three rules of the theory.Meanwhile,the features of the source texts are analyzed,which include metaphors,numeral abbreviations and verbs with Chinese characteristics at the lexical level;non-subject sentences as well as long and complex sentences at the syntactic level;titles,redundancy and other writing styles of Chinese news.After the comparison between Chinese and English,the author of this report has gained an insight into the difficulties in translating website news.Accordingly,some translation strategies are proposed: As for expressions with Chinese characteristics at the lexical level,the author of this report tried to “eliminate obstacles” and utilized strategies such as paraphrase,literal translation with annotation,and conversion to accommodate the target culture.At the sentence level,the techniques of division,re-structuring and amplification were adopted to “clarify the logic of sentences”,so as to improve readability and acceptance and achieve good publicity purposes.At the stylistic level,omission and combination techniques were employed to achieve the goal of “being authentic” and realize the communicative purpose of informative and vocative texts.According to the report,under the three rules of the Skopos theory,translators need to choose appropriate translation techniques based on the entrusting party’s needs and the source texts,to efficiently meet the demands of information dissemination and help the publicity and image-building for the university.The author of the report hopes that these strategies examined in this report can inspire and assist other translators in news translation or foreign publicity.