A Study Of C-E Translation Of The Report To The 17^th Party's National Congress From The Perspective Of Translator's Subjectivity

Translation of political documents plays an important role in China's publicity to the outside world. However, research in this field has not been given its due attention. For recent years, relevant research has evolved with specific problems in translating and translation criteria and still rare is the theory-based research, which leaves much space for further research. Since the cultural turn of the translation research, translator's subjectivity has drawn increasing attention. But most of the researches are about translator's subjectivity applied in literary translation, while little is mentioned in political documents. Given the high command of political documents towards accuracy, research in this field is mainly about faithfulness and translator's subjectivity has long been ignored. Faithfulness and translator's subjectivity is actually not incompatible. The display of translator's subjectivity just aims at achieving faithfulness to the original text and improving translation quality.Hermeneutics, Skopos theory and translator's invisibility have laid profound theoretical foundations for translator's subjectivity in that they unexceptionally stress the important role of the translator. Translator's subjectivity entails restriction, creativity and purpose, which can be reflected in the translation of political documents in the following four aspects:political documents bear no distortion to the original text, and translators first of all should achieve a precise understanding of the original text; due to its intrinsic political nature, translators must cultivate a sharp political awareness and weigh the political connotation of some words; with the development of the times, new words constantly emerge and connotations of some culture-loaded words have changed as well, so translators should be equipped with the awareness of the times to create new translations and make appropriate modifications to the original translation; translators ought to adopt different translation strategies and methods to achieve faithful reproduction of the original text and disseminate specific Chinese culture.With a case study of the C-E translation of The Report to the 17th Party's National Congress, this thesis focuses on translator's subjectivity in adopting different strategies and methods at the linguistic and cultural levels. At the linguistic level, detailed analyses dwell on three aspects:the lexical/syntactical/textual levels. At the lexical level, methods of deleting, converting the abstract to the concrete and varying in wording are often employed to deal with category nouns, multiple modifiers, repetition, abstract terms and the same wording in the original text. At the syntactical level, translators should flexibly reproduce the subject of the sentence, the tense and aspect and reorganize the structure of the sentence. At the textual level, translators should take into account the different preferences of Chinese and English towards lexical cohesion, conjunction and information structure and make appropriate conversions. At the cultural level, elaborations are given from the translation of culture-loaded words and some rhetoric devices which can reflect cultural discrepancies, such as metaphor and personification. Considering the purpose of the translated political documents is to let the outside world know China and disseminate the idiosyncratcic Chinese culture, strategy of foreignization is usually adopted to retain and publicize Chinese culture. Under the guidance of foreignization, literal translation, interpretive translation and annotation translation are often used. As for metaphor, translators can resort to three methods:reproducing the same image, replacing ST images with TT images and converting images to senses, while referring to personification, translators should guard against unwarranted personification and convert it into plain language.Based on the above analyses, the writing of this thesis stresses the great importance of translator's subjectivity in translating political documents and carries out research from this theoretical angle, with the hope that it can shed some enlightenment on further research.