A Diachronic Study On The English Translations And Communication Of “renlei Mingyun Gongtongti”

RMG(renlei mingyun gongtongti)is one of the Chinese important diplomatic and political terms.Few empirical researches on the translation changes and international communication of RMG have been found.This paper aims to analyze the changes in the English translations of RMG both in forms and meaning,and the communication of it in world English media.We collect the English and Chinese versions of keynote speeches of Xi Jinping on different diplomatic occasions from 2012 to 2018 and Chinese published government documents to compile an RMG Translation Corpus,including 25 passages and 140,925 words.This paper also collects English news reports that mention RMG from the world English media in LexisNexis database from 2013 to 2019 to compile an RMG News Corpus which includes 3689 passages from overseas English media,totaling 2,611,061 words and 6369 passages from Chinese English media,totaling 4,952,787 words.By referring to LDOCE and COCA,this paper investigates the changes of RMG’s translation in forms and meaning.Besides,this paper also analyzes the communication of RMG based on Laswell’s Communication Model.The results show that the English translations of RMG have changed from “community of” to “community with”,“common” to “shared”,“destiny” to “future”,and “human beings” to “mankind”.Besides,its meaning has changed from a sense of fate to a sense of future,from a same and fixed world view to a shared and inclusive world view.The coverage of world English media mentioned RMG has been on a clear upward trend.The sum of the coverage of foreign media has a positive linear correlation with the coverage of Chinese media.Further observations reveal that overseas media mention Afghanistan and Pakistan many times,and use negative discourse and personal pronouns;Chinese media directly cite Xi Jinping’s speeches and describe China-related policies.Terminologization of terminological translation can explain the changes of RMG’s translation.Overseas media often copy the news from Chinese media.We need to release more English news about political terms with Chinese characteristics,open more international conferences,and consider the characteristics of different countries in international communication.