Cultural Universality Vs Difference In Translation--On Rendering Into English Of Chinese Official Political And Economic Speeches

Official political and economic speeches play an important role in presenting the government's standpoints on internal and external political and economic affairs. Featured by a political highlight and exact wording, these speeches are often marked with cultural labels, which make their rendering a great challenge.Proceeding from the characteristics of these speeches, this thesis analyzes the contradiction between cultural universality and difference in such speeches, and discusses strategies and methods adopted by official translators or interpreters in handling the contradiction. It intends to argue the principles of "seeking commonness while retaining foreigness" and "giving priority to political awareness and sensitiveness" are two important principles in the rendering of these speeches.The first chapter serves as an introduction, presenting the significance and difficulty in the rendering of official speeches. This chapter also describes the purpose, research methodology and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two reviews previous studies on cultural translation studies by western and domestic scholars. It also includes the theory on cultural universality and difference, and a summary of recent theoretical achievements on the rendering into English of Chinese official speeches.Chapter Three discusses the language style of public speeches, official speeches in particular, and the special features of their rendering.Chapter Four analyzes the cultural universality and difference in Chinese official political and economic speeches. In this part, the author mainly discusses the non-inherent culture-universal factors resulted from the mutual cultural impacts between Chinese and Western cultures, as well as the culture-different factors, which lays a foundation for the analysis of rendering strategies and methods involved.Chapter Five discusses the strategies and methods the official translators or interpreters employ in handling cultural universality and difference. This thesis categories the strategies, according to Venuti's theory, into domestication and foreignization. The chapter alsosummarizes some methods often used in the handling of cultural factors: back translation, transliteration, transliteration plus explanation, literal translation, literal translation plus explanation, paraphrasing, replacement and omission. Finally, it emphasizes three important considerations in choosing strategies, namely, political awareness, speech purpose and audience of target language.The last part is a conclusion of the thesis. It reaffirms that translators and interpreters cannot afford to neglect the cultural factors in the rendering into English of official political and economic speeches. By adopting proper strategies and methods, it is possible to handle well the contradiction between cultural universality and difference. Because of the difficulty in rendering of these speeches, a competent translator or interpreter must possess more than a proficiency in both Chinese and English and an insight into their cultures. S/he has to be highly sensitive and accountable.