Functional Equivalence And Translation Of Government Work Report

In the process of China's extensive exchange with the outside world,there is an increasingly keen desire from the outside world to learn more about China.The annual Government Work Report(hereafter referred to as the Report),which summarizes the past achievements and puts forward future plans,has always been attracting worldwide attention.Starting from the functional equivalence theory,this thesis intends to make a preliminary study of the translation of the Report in the current Chinese international communication,aiming to find out the underlying translation principles and some effective translation strategies and techniques in this area.This thesis consists of four chapters.The first chapter begins with an overview of Nida's functional equivalence theory, including definition of functional equivalence theory,principles for producing functional equivalence translation,and its theoretical contribution and criticism.This part is more theoretically oriented.Then it briefly reviews relevant studies of functional equivalence theory both in the West and in China.The second chapter studies the translation of political texts both in the West and in China.It also makes a brief analysis of the stylistic features of the Report at the lexical, syntactical and discourse levels.From this part,we can draw a conclusion that research of C-E translation of political texts under the theoretical guidance of functional equivalence theory is a relatively new field,especially C-E translation of the Report.The third chapter,which focuses on how to integrate functional equivalence theory with translation practice,is the main part of this thesis.This part expounds on the analysis of the Report and its English translation.It mainly discusses what strategies should be adopted at the following three levels:lexical level,syntactical level and discourse level.At each level,various kinds of translation equivalence are proposed and analyzed.At the lexical level,analysis is made from the angle of lexicon,for the choice of words is important for accurate conveyance of the meaning in the source text.Politics equivalence, collocation equivalence and tone equivalence are elaborated in this part.Also discussed is the translation of high-sounding words,neologism and culture-loaded terms,which appear frequently in the Report.Amplification plus interpretation is a good way of rendering these words to convey the deep meaning of the source language.At the syntactic level,the choice of subjects for the no-subject sentences is discussed first.After that,information arrangement and balance equivalence are explained with examples.At the discourse level, this chapter,based on the functional grammar by Halliday makes analysis of the Report and its translation and introduces translation techniques of combining,dividing and cohesion.Cohesion is expounded in three aspects:reference,conjunction and lexical cohesion.Based on functional equivalence theory,the last chapter of this thesis explores four principles guiding the translation of the Report,namely:accuracy,intelligibility, naturalness and echo response.