A Functional-Equivalence Approach To The Study Of Redundancy In C-E Translation

With the development of China’s comprehensive strength and the improvement of its international status, China has become an indispensible member in international stage. The rest of the world has a keen desire to learn more about China. As a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, the annual government work report (GWR) is a vital media for its basic status, policies and culture known to outer world. Therefore, the translation quality of GWR is important. Since the GWR of2012is typical of Chinese political discourse, it is chosen as a case study in this paper. This study attempts to take Nida’s "Funcational Equivalence" as an approach to explore the handling of redundancy in the translation of GWR.Since there are huge differences in linguistic features and cultural backgrounds between Chinese and English, this would result in the redundancy imbalance in C-E translation. Redundancy imbalance mainly appears as over-redundancy and under-redundancy. Over-redundancy is caused by the frequent use of repeated four-word structure, category words and redundant modifiers, while under-redundancy is caused by many numeral abbreviations and emerging words. In order to reach the "Functional Equivalence" in the translation of GWR, the redundancy in Chinese needs to be adjusted to realize the redundancy balance in between Chinese and English. The author has reviewed the previous researches both in redundancy and political discourse, and gave a detailed introduction to GWR. On the basis of Nida’s’Minimal Functional Equivalence’and adaption strategies, this paper adopts a qualitative method with a large number of examples in2012GWR to explore the handling of redundancy imbalance between Chinese and English. And the handling is aimed at the redundancy in Chinese, which appears in semantic, syntax, and culture.The study finds that the strategies to cope with the redundancy in GWR primarily consist of omission, deletion, amplification and paraphrase, in which omission and deletion are applied to handle over-redundancy, amplification and paraphrase are adopted to deal with under-redundancy. Thus,"Functional Equivalence" is reached through redundancy balance by the choices of these strategies. This paper finally concludes that in order to achieve Functional Equivalence and convey the faithful information to the redundancy in GWR, it’s necessary to reduce or add redundancy according to the detailed situation. The author hopes to help the future translators avoid redundancy imbalance in C-E translation and make their translations better and more understandable to foreign readers, thus improving the whole cross-cultural communication.