On C-E Translation Of The 2008 Government Work Report From The Perspective Of Functionalism

German Functionalism came into being in 1970s. Its founder Katharina Reiss proposed that the prospective function of target text should depend on the translation brief. Later on this basis, her student Hans J. Vermeer established the fundamental theory in Functionalism: Skopostherie. Since it dethrones source text as the only yardstick to translation and grants translator more freedom, Skopostheorie, compared with other traditional translation theories, is more feasible for the translation of applied text. However, functionalist theory just provides translators with a fresh perspective, the specific translation strategies and techniques are determined by translator themselves. In the current situation, official document translation lacks a guiding theory and mainly depends on translator's experience. In order to improve this situation, by using the Chinese-English Translation of"The 2008 Government Work Report"as an example, the author attempts to combine German Functionalism with official document in this thesis and tries to put forward some suggestions for practical use.The paper is divided into five chapters:The first chapter is an introduction to the reaserch background, which serves as the inspiration of the thesis, from the research range, to the thesis structure.The second chapter introduces the basic views, development in German functionalism and other related theories.Chapter three points out the fundamental differences between functionalism and non-functionalism lies in that, it is the function of target text, instead of source text, decides the translation strategy. In addition, the author tentatively proposes three translation principles: faithfulness, reader-orientedness and ideology-consciousness.Under the guidance of the above concluded strategies and principles, pragmatic problems, cultural problems and text-specific problems in chapter four are tackled in hierarchical order so as to achieve the intended function in the target text. In order to solve cultural problems, the author offers such techniques as literal, interpretive and annotation translation to achieve the referential function. Furthermore some proposals and advices are offered on how to be faithful to the originals and how to deal with the words concerning ideology. In dealing with the text-specific problems, the author offers such techniques as deletion, addition, rearrangement, substitution and transfer in the order of achieving the intended function. It should be stressed that, whatever techniques or strategies are adopted, it should be better served to realize the intended target function.At last, the author proposes a tentative translation model for official document from the perspective of functionalism.