Study On The Chinese Translation Of "Very Sorry" In The Sino-US Military Plane Collision Incident Under The Skopos Theory

After the happening of the Sino-US military plane collision on April 1, 2001, any action taken by China and the US to resolve the serious incident has attracted the world's attention. Among them, the most spotlighted and controversial action is how to translate the "very sorry" in the English letter for expressing an apology to the Chinese government and people by the US government into the Chinese language. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China 's Chinese translation of "very sorry" as "shenbiaoqianyi" has been argued fiercely on media and Internet. Most mainstream media in United States mocked the Chinese government with the excuse of twisting the English "regret" into a Chinese "apology". Some young Chinese netizens refused to accept the Chinese translation, holding that "very sorry" is not a formal apology from the US government. Some intellectual men criticized the translation as non-equivalent and unfaithful. Then how to look at the translation of ambiguous diplomatic texts? This thesis applied the Germany functionalist Skopos theory to the diplomatic translation. Through the three key principles of Skopos theory, this thesis analyzed the Chinese translation made by the Foreign Ministry and found that, as the top Skopos for the diplomatic translation is to safeguard national interests, it is reasonable, according to Vermeer's Skopos rule that the skopos determines the translation methods and strategies, to translate the diplomatic texts with semantic ambiguity or vagueness freely in certain scale. Meanwhile, the scale is restricted by the nature of the source text, that is to say, as long as the ambiguous text is the negotiated result, such as the citation of "very sorry" in this case, it provides the authority and room for different interpretations of the result. Therefore, the Chinese translation issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry is completely rational and faithful. The present analysis also provides an insightful way to understand the controversial diplomatic translations and the guiding principles for the diplomatic translators dealing with such texts.