On Functional Equivalence Of The English Version Of The 2009 Government Work Report

The annual government work report (GWR for short) reviews the government performance of the past year and outlines its future policies and plans. It aims to introduce the development of China to the outside world. The GWR translation is affected by cultural and linguistic elements and is related directly to the international image of the government and the country. However, in official documents, translators tend to follow strictly the original text for fear that they might make political mistakes. Actually, this practice results largely from the ignorance of the differences between different readerships and the specialties of official documents. As we know, the readers of the source text (ST) and target text (TT) differ greatly in linguistic and cultural background. The TT readership may fail to know what can be taken for granted by ST readership, so a word-for-word mechanic translation would cause misunderstanding and be rejected by its target receptors. The thesis makes a tentative study of the 2009 Report from the view of Nida's FE theory in the hope that it can offer some guidance to related official document translation.The author, in this thesis, first discusses the necessity and possibility of applying functional equivalence to GWR translation and lists some requirements for its translation, secondly introduces the FE theory, making a distinction between the two basic orientations in translation, namely formal equivalence and dynamic/functional equivalence and pointing out that the latter enjoys priority over the former. In Chapter Two the author makes a detailed analysis of stylistic features and functions of the 2009 Report, reviews the related research of official document translation and points out a wrong tendency in the practice——Chinglish. This enables the reader to have a better understanding of GWR and its translation. The author tries to offer a solution to the question of how can translators make the translation the closest natural equivalent to the source language message. Analyses are made at three levels respectively:lexical level, syntactic level and textual level. Finally, the author summarizes the whole paper and points out the meaning and limitations of the study.