The Translator's Interference In China's Political Document Translation

As we know, China's political documents play an important role in the economic, political, cultural and diplomatic life in China. Therefore the translation of political documents has aroused people's attention. However, there do exist numerous problems in political document translation. The most prominent one is Chinglish. There are many reasons for it, one of which is that the translator is excessively constrained by the original words and sacrifices the spirit. To solve this problem, the author holds that the translator should positively interfere in the translation process. Yet the author also reminds that the translator should avoid excessive interference and not distort the original meaning. The author maintains that interference and semantic fidelity are not mutually exclusive. To interfere is to convey the original meaning better. Interference doesn't violate the principle of fidelity, for when we say the translation should be faithful to the original, we mean the original meaning, the original spirit instead of the original words. To make the part a complete whole, in the following the author also puts forward the essential requirements for a competent translator, which are the prerequisites for a translator's interference.With all these in mind, the author will focus on the study of the translation of Chinese political writings from the prospective of the translator's interference. To make the thesis more persuasive, all the examples are selected from the full text of Jiang Zemin's Report at the 16th Party Congress and the Report on the Work of the Government of 2002, delivered by Zhu Rongji at the National People's Congress. In order to highlight the theme of the thesis, the author has revised some published translations and offered the reasons for doing so.Firstly, the introduction of these theories illustrates the possibility and feasibility of the translator's interference, which have laid a solid theoretic foundation for the thesis as well. Secondly, this thesis discusses how the translator interfere in the political translation practice of Jiang Zemin's Report at the 16th Party Congress and the Report on the Work of the Government of 2002.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is subdivided into fivesections. The first section briefly introduces the development of contemporary translation theories in the West, which now highlights the translator's position in the translating process. In the second section, the author introduces the deconstruction and its representatives' point of view. The representatives to be introduced are Foucault, Derrida and Venuti. Each of the three has his own emphasis. Foucault holds the translator should deconstruct the original, Derrida insists that the translator rewrite the original, and Venuti maintains the translator should become visible. All these theories advocate the translator's interference. The third section introduces Vermeer's skopos theory. To realize the goal of translation, the translator needs to interfere in a positive way. In the following section, in Section Four, the author makes a summary of all these theories, which share a common feature, i.e., all of them emphasize the translator's role. In Section Five, the author discusses the relationship between translation theory and practice. The author maintains that translation theory is divided into pure theory and applied theory. Though the pure theory cannot tell exactly how the translator does in practice, it offers the theoretical guidance and foundation. The pure theory may guide the practice via applied translation theory.In the second chapter, the author mainly discusses how the translator interferes in the document translation at the following three levels: lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels. At the lexical level, the emphasis is on the translation of Chinese category words, the intensifiers, the modifiers, and words of high frequency. At the grammatical level, the author dwells on the translation of tense, aspect, and voice as well as the treatment of subordination. At the discourse level, the author addresses the handling of repetition, conjunction, substitute, the Chinese topic theme and the English subject theme, as well as the handling of the information structure. It is worth noting to point out that the author of this thesis has offered her revisions of some standard translations to show the validity of the translator's interference; and she also gives the reasons for the proposed revisions. In the end of the paper, the author concludes that this thesis has made some contributions, trivial and peripheral as theyare, to the translation theory and practice in the following three aspects: First, the quality of a translation often depends on the degree of the translator's interference. Second, what is the relationship between interference and fidelity? Third, the author also expresses her view on the relationship between translation theory and practice. Last but not the least, the author makes a study on how the translator interferes in China's political document translation practice.The author writes the thesis with a view to directing people's attention from the original to the translated text and the translator. When many of us are still studyjnow to be faithful to the original and how to find the equivalence for the original, some Western scholars have shifted the emphasis on to target-language-related factors such as the evaluation on the translated texts, the possible response from the target language reader, the translator, and his subjectivity and creativity. It is necessary for us to follow the trend and break new theoretical grounds.