The Study Of E-C Translation Of International Political Discourse Based On Reiss’s Translation Theory

As the reform and opening up going into depth, China has expanded political exchangeswith the outside world. More and more Chinese people desire to have a comprehensiveunderstanding of the international political situation and thoughts, and then view internationalpolitical event from international perspective. Therefore, the E-C translation of internationalpolitical discourse is an effective medium for our people to know the world.From1950s to1980s, researches on translation of political discourse mainly focused onthe C-E translation of Mao’s thought and Deng’s Theory. With the reform and opening up,translators began to have opportunity to contact with a large number of international politicaldiscourses. Thus, Corresponding researches on translation of international political discourseappeared in that time. However, the research of E-C translation of international politicalattracts less attention than C-E translation of Chinese political discourse does. Besides, mostof the researches are confined to the translation of specific expressions, which are a summaryof pioneer translator’s experiences rather than a systematical research result based on atranslation theory. Therefore, to improve the research on this field, this paper analyzes the E-Ctranslation of international political discourse on the basis of Reiss’s translation theory whichexplores the translation process completely.When translating international political discourse, translators may find some difficultiesas following: the complexity of political texts, the flexibility of political languages, and themultiplicity of political implication. To solve these problems, Reiss’s translation theory may be the satisfactory theory to guide the practical E-C translation of international politicaldiscourse.In Reiss’s translation theory, she argues that the translations of different types of textshould adopt corresponding translation methods. The translation strategy is decided by thetext type. Karl Bühler proposes that in language there are three chief communicative functions:representative function, expressive function and appellative function. In the light of his theory,Reiss classifies texts into three types: the content-focused text, the form-focused text and theappeal-focused text. Each of them has its own dominating communicative function. Differenttranslation criteria and strategies should be used in translation process based on text’sdominating communicative function and text type. Therefore, this paper adopts Reiss’stranslation theory (text typology) to analyze communicative functions, features, text types,translation strategies of international political discourse and to introduce some translationtechniques in practical translation of it in order to contribute to E-C translation ofinternational political discourse.