Balancing Redundancy In English-Chinese Translation Of Political Texts

This report is based on the English-Chinese translation of EU-China-Africa Trilateral Relations in a Multipolar World(Chapters 1-3).The source text is a political text on the trends of EU-China-Africa trilateral relations in current international environment from EU’s perspective.Political texts are mostly informative,characterized by rigorous argumentation,and this poses challenges to translators.For one thing,translators should guarantee the accuracy of the target text,and for another,they should also consider readability,that is,to balance redundancy by adding or reducing redundancy in target texts.How to balance redundancy is the focus of this report.According to the information theory by Shannon,starting from the sender,information is encoded into signals,transmitted through channel,then decoded into new information and finally received by the receiver.In the process of transmission,information is interfered by such factors as noise,communication load and channel capacity.Hence,only with appropriate means of reducing the noise and balancing communication load and channel capacity can information be transmitted to the greatest extent.In order to solve these problems,the author and translator discusses several translation methods at both the levels of redundancy deficiency and redundancy excess in the third chapter of case analysis,which include adding,omitting,and transferring and extending so as to achieve the best translation.The translation not only helps the translator develop a deeper understanding of the trends in international relations but also of translation redundancy.It is hoped that this report will provide some reference for translators of similar source texts in the future.