A Comparative Study Of Chinese Translations Of U.S.-China Joint Statement Under Manipulation Theory

Among all the bilateral relations, U.S.-China relation is one of the most important one. The best way to know the development of U.S.-China relation is to read carefully the political documents signed between both countries. U.S.-China Joint Statement is the most important document published during Obama's visit to China. Apart from the one published by Chinese government, the U.S. State Department also issued its own Chinese version of the document to interpret its own understanding. And therefore, in order to better understand both countries'different political attitudes, it is necessary to compare the two Chinese versions and find out how the political texts like this document are manipulated by different ideologies of the two countries and by the two governments.Because this political document was published in November 2009, so currently there are no studies to put this political document into a larger social and cultural context to analyze the influence of social factors on translation. Under this circumstance, this thesis tries to study the manipulation of ideology and patronage in the translation of U.S-China Joint Statement with its two Chinese versions as the research objects.This study is a descriptive research. The thesis will list many examples from the two Chinese versions of U.S-China Joint Statement to explain and demonstrate the existence of manipulation in translation by referring to the ideological differences and patronage activities. Through comparing the two Chinese versions, this thesis concludes that manipulation indeed exists in the Chinese translations of this political document. At the same time, the author points out that the translations of U.S-China Joint Statement are in itself neither good nor bad. The two different versions are actually both governments'different interpretations of the original text from their different class positions. The author hopes that both translators and the readers in target language can realize that all translations are the manipulation of the original texts and manipulation is a kind of translation strategy.