浅谈护肤品说明书翻译错误及对策_英语论文

On Translation Mistakes & Strategies of Skin-care Product Manuals

摘要

随着中国对外政策的实施以及加入世贸组织，大量的国货如潮水般涌入外国市场，其中不乏国内护肤品。由于不同护肤品品牌之间日益激烈的竞争，各个化妆品公司都在费尽心思促销。因此，如何让国外消费者了解其护肤品成为了关键的问题。给他们展示护肤品说明书是最有效的方法之一。因此，护肤品说明书的翻译质量对帮助国外消费者了解并接纳此类产品至关重要。然而，国内外学术界对护肤品说明书的翻译很少关注，使得关于护肤品说明书翻译的研究远落后于其他应用翻译，如医学翻译，商务英语的翻译等。护肤品说明书既有实用价值也有高度的商业价值,但其翻译质量却达不到理想的要求。本篇论文以《中华人民共和国国家标准 GB\T-19682-2005翻译服务译文质量要求》为标准, 选取15篇护肤品说明书为语料库并找出其中的翻译错误，将其分为五大类：拼写问题，语法问题，误译，漏译，文化和风格问题.根据上述所列问题，可以给出一些策略来解决这些问题。

关键词：护肤品说明书；翻译错误；策略

Abstract

With China’s enforcement of open-door policy and entry into WTO, a mass of domestic products, including domestic skin-care products, flood into foreign markets. Because of the intensifying competition between different skin-care product brands, cosmetics companies are racking their brains for promotions. Therefore, how to make the foreign consumers appreciate and accept these products is a significant matter. Translating the skincare product Chinese instructions into English is one of the most effective methods. In this sense, the translation quality of these instructions plays a key role in helping foreign consumers learn and accept these products. However, in the academic circles at home and abroad, there is little concern over the translation of skin-care product instructions. Consequently, the study on the translation of skin-care products falls behind other pragmatic translations, such as medicine translation and business English translation and so on. The translations of skin-care product are of practice and commercial value, but the present translation quality of skin-care product is far from ideal. Based on the translation quality requirements and translation service standards (GB / T 19682-2005), this paper is designed to analyze the problems found in the translations of skin-care product instructions by collecting 15 skin-care product manuals and using them as a corpus. This study shows that the translation problems of skin-care product translation fall into the major five categories---spelling problems, grammar problems, mistranslation, missing translation, problems of language style and cultural factors. In conformity to the problems listed, some strategies are to be given. 

Keywords: skin-care manuals; translation mistakes; strategies

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the research 1

1.2 Significance of the research 1

1.3 Data collection 1

1.4 Problems identification 1

2. Literature review 2

3. Translation problems of skin-care product manuals 2

3.1 Grammar problems 3

3.1.1 Sentence structure problems 3

3.1.2 Missing-components problems 4

3.1.3 Tense problems 4

3.1.4 Wrong choice of words 5

3.1.5 Subject-predicate inconsistency 6

3.1.6 Punctuation problems 6

3.1.7 Non-parallelism 6

3.1.8 Comparative problems 7

3.2 Mistranslation 7

3.3 Missing translation 7

3.4 Spelling problems 8

3.5 Mistakes of language style and cultural factors 8

4. Strategies and methods 9

Conclusion 11

References 12