Factors And Strategies In C-E Translation Of Political Publicity

With the further reform and opening-up to the outside world, especially since China's entry into the WTO and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games was held successfully, China has become more influential in the world than ever before. Nowadays, overseas friends are eager to have a thorough,correct and detailed understanding about China. They want to know China, not only its history and culture, but also its present political development. As a result, the translation of political publicity materials has become important increasingly. If we can translate successfully, we can not only enhance mutual understandings between different countries with divergent political systems, establish a good image of China but also promote economic and cultural cooperation between nations, races. However, currently, poor quality in political publicity translation causes great dissatisfaction from the overseas audience and arouses the worries of the Chinese translators.So proceeding from the characteristics of political publicity, this thesis analyzes the cultural and linguistic factors affecting Chinese-English translation, and discusses the strategies of domestication and foreignization adopted in handling these problems in the light of Skopos Theory. Based on Skopos Theory, translation is a purposeful intercultural action and the specific translation skopos will decide the translation strategies or methods. In the process of translation, the translation is conditioned by many factors. In order to achieve the purpose of translation, the translator should grasp the intention of the source text to choose the proper translation strategies according to the intended function of different types of the texts. In the translation of political publicity, we may adopt the strategy of domestication in order to make the translated version intelligible and acceptable to the target readers. The translation text should be a target language-culture oriented, reader centered and the expressions should be acceptable language. Therefore, domestication is an effective strategy in political publicity materials translation. Because of the culture differences between China and the world, the Chinese cultural characteristic expressions can't have equivalents in English. This can only be translated by foreignization strategy. Foreignization maintains the original flavor as much as possible in order to keep the foreignness of the source language culture. And Chinese culture will have an influence on the world culture. In the process of translation, domestication and foreignization are not contradictory but complementary each other in essence. Based on the analysis of the translation skopos, the writer's intention and the reader, the translator may decide which source language culture should be kept, which should be adjusted and which should be deleted.How to apply the constructive ideas of Skopostheorie to instruct our political publicity translation deserves a further discussion. In this thesis, the author will make a rewarding attempt. Adopting the methodology of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), the thesis seeks to open a new perspective for the C-E translation of political publicity materials. Based on an analysis of many examples, the author comes to a conclusion: Skopostheorie not only is feasible to guide C-E translation of political publicity, but also is adapted to the translation of political neologisms.