Elimination Of Redundancy In Chinese-English Translation Of Political Discourses-From The Perspective Of The Economy Principle Of Language

The years after China's adoption of the reform and opening-up policy have witnessed China's increasingly important role in the world politics, economy and culture. As we know, in today's globalized world, no country can score its achievements and play its role in world affairs single-handedly. China is no exception, what China has achieved is attributed to China's cooperation with the rest of the world. Such cooperation, first of all, calls for communication, in which translation has occupied an overarching position.Among the translation of various kinds of discourses, what has greatly merited the author's attention is the translation of political discourses, such as their translation criteria, how to translate new terms and new expressions in them, how to avoid Chinglish and especially how to eliminate redundancy in their translation and so on. Redundancy, according to Dictionary of Translation Studies (Shuttleworth & Cowie, 2004: 141), refers to "the expression more than once of the same units of information". Moderate redundancies do good to communication by enabling the information receptor to get rid of the negative impacts for information transmission, while too many of them reduce the efficiency of communication.Communication efficiency is highly associated with the Economy Principle of Language, which advances that there should be no superfluous information in a sentence, every item in a sentence has to have a reason for being there, and texts should be simplified as much as possible on condition that the total amount of information transmitted remains unchanged so as to reduce the time and energy spent on the encoding and decoding processes of language. In a word, this principle favors "quick and easy" (Leech, 1983: 67) communication.Political discourses, due to their authority and close bearing with policies, and the guidelines and strategies of a country, require all the more faithfulness, political sensitivity, proper sequencing of wording and employment of words with proper intensity in their translation. These requirements have forced translators to employ a word-for-word translation strategy. In so doing, translators have produced a lot of redundancy in their translations, which not only runs counter to the Economy Principle of Language, but also makes the translated texts less intelligible and less aesthetically pleasant to foreigners.In this study, the author has conducted research on redundancy based on the Economy Principle of Language. The author will concentrate on the following three main points: first of all, what has caused so many redundancies in Chinese-English translation of political discourse; secondly, how many categories of redundancy are there in Chinese-English translation of political discourses; and finally, how can such redundancies be avoided and what is the significance of avoiding them. It is hoped that the present study will shed light on future translators so that they can guard against redundancies when they translate political discourses from Chinese into English and make their translations better and more aesthetically appealing to foreign readers.