On English Translation Of Chinese Government Work Report From The Perspective Of Metafunctions

The gradual deepening of reform and opening-up as well as socialist modernization drive has made China become an indispensable role in the international community, which, as a result, is increasingly willing to know more about China. The political writings, describing China's domestic situations, outlining China's political principles, and presenting China's attitudes and standpoints towards international issues, are considered as the most authoritative and important sources of information for the foreign countries to know about China. Thus, the translation of political texts is of great significance.Compared with the importance of political texts, studies of the political text translation in the theoretical perspective are far from satisfactory. Most studies concerning about the translation of political discourse are still mainly experience-oriented without theoretical support. Moreover, most of these practice-based researches mainly focus on the specific expressions at the lexical and syntactical level, such as the translation of special political terms or jargons and sentences with rhetorical features, rather than the textual and the contextual levels that tend to affect more on the accuracy and effectiveness of translated versions of the originals. Herein, this thesis will take Government Work Reports and their English versions as cases and analyze the characteristics of the source texts in the light of the three metafunctions. Attention would be focused on checking the realization of these metafunctions in the English versions and how they are realized so as to conclude some feasible methods or strategies for the political text translation.By analyzing Government Work Report, it is found that in the ideational function, the material process has a large majority over the other types of process when a Government Work Report concludes the achievement gained in the past years and proposes the plan for the coming years. The statistic study shows that the target text has similar distribution of process types to the original text, which declares the chief transference of the ideational function in Government Work Report translation. However, faithful translation of the ideational meaning does not mean strict preservation of the original process type. Due to the differences in idiomaticity and syntactic structure between English and Chinese, translators need to make adjustments in the Transitivity system to meet the idiomatic use of the target language, which include verb deletion, verb addition, and the shift of parts of speech. From the aspect of the interpersonal function, the analysis shows that the numerous Chinese modal verbs are the most prominent characteristic of Government Work Report. In transferring the interpersonal function, through taking into consideration the purpose and the relationship between the parts involved in the texts and by having a thorough analysis of the context and the attitude of the speaker, translators need to change the modality and select appropriate English model words to achieve the interpersonal equivalence.The textual function in the Chinese Government Work Report is often realized through the run-on sentence, paratactic sentence, parallelism, and paragraph of a topic sentence plus a number of run-on clauses that are in a way related to the topic. Since the two languages have different cohesive devices in the textual organization, changes or variances are unavoidable in translating the Chinese Government Work Report into English. With an analysis of the target text, the present article generalizes four strategies that might be of help for the realization of the textual equivalence to the source text, namely, clarification of the semantic logic relationship; supplementation of an introductory summary sentence; rechunking of the paragraph; and reorganization of the parallelism. Meanwhile, it also discovers that the punctuation mark plays an important role in bringing about textual cohesion.The adoption of the three metafunctions as the theoretical framework in this thesis attempts to examine the features and deconstruct the meanings of Government Work Report with the intention to pave the way for the successful political text translation. In addition, this tentative study is intended to prove the practicability and feasibility of Systemic Functional Linguistics in political discourse analysis and Chinese-English translation studies.