Constructing Nationality: Website Translation Between English And Chinese In A Postcolonial Context

The dissertation is an attempt to analyze China's postcolonial condition as reflected in Chinese-English website translation against the background of the exponential development of information and communication technology (ICT). Combing Frantz Fanon's and Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theories, the author chose to elaborate on the reconstruction of Chinese nationality through translation. According to Fanon, it takes three phases for nationalism to mature—the assimilation phase, the cultural nationalist phase characterized by imitation and mimicry as expanded by Bhabha, and the final nationalist phase featured by the hybridity in national culture and identity. To that end, this thesis is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion.In the introduction, the author briefly explains her research aims, the significance for selecting this subject matter, the thesis elaborated on and the methodology used, and the structure of the thesis.Chapter One explains the background of this research and defines the various major concepts involved—postcolonialism, postcolonial studies, nationalism, postcolonial translation studies,"Digital Divide"and e-government. It gives a comprehensive introduction to the origins and key figures in postcolonial studies, and particularly nationalism from the postcolonial perspective as reflected in Fanon and Bhabha's theories, stressing on the three phases in nationalist development.Chapter Two reviews studies concerning website globalization and localization both in China and overseas, and also researches carried out to investigate cultural issues in ICT-related translation.Chapter Three serves as an extensive preparation for the case study to be carried out in the next chapter. It specifies the research question, and describes matters such as language selection, website selection, analytical method as well as the framework it used to implement linguistic analysis.In Chapter Four, the author accomplishes a comparative and postcolonial study of Gov.cn and Gov.hk concerning their news sections. Through quantitative analysis, the author gets to the understanding that China, including Hong Kong, is now located in the second phase of nationalist development, i.e. the cultural nationalist phase, and shows clear tendency towards the final nationalist stage. Portrayal of Chinese nationality in the current website translation is also revealed.The dissertation is concluded by examining reasons for the development phase of nationalism in Hong Kong and mainland China. The author points out the significance and issues to be taken into consideration when constructing Chinese nationality, and tries to offer insight for the emergence of a sound and mature Chinese nationality.