A Study Of The C-to-e Translation Of Culture-specific Items Occurring In The Reports On Government Work

Since the Chinese government adopted the policy of reform at home and opening up to the outside world more than thirty years ago, China has scored great achievements in her socialist construction and become the focus of world attention. As a result, China's international status is notably elevated. Annual Report on Government Work (RGW) reviews and summarizes the work of the past year or the past five years and sets forth the basic plans and policies in the fields of economy, politics, diplomacy and the enhancement of Chinese people's living standards, etc., for the following one or five years. It is not controversial that RGW is the authoritative source of latest situation and development of China for the outside world. In this sense, the translation of RGW plays a vital role. RGW of our central government abounds in culture-specific items (CSI), which come from the specific Chinese cultural, historical and social background. They have no counterparts or complete equivalences in the target readers'cultural system, thus the translation of CSIs has turned out to be the most difficult and important language points in the translation of RGW. With regard to this issue, the present dissertation attempts to make an analysis and a study of the collected translation examples of CSIs in Reports on Government Work of the past 10 years, by way of descriptive method of translation studies, to be more exact, through translation model analysis and philosophical thinking about the collected language materials. On the basis of the above-mentioned work and according to the collected literatures, some translation strategies for CSIs are listed as references or methods available in the translating practice together with the explanations of them from the perspective of function translation theory so as to attest that Functionalist Approaches can play a guiding role in the choice of translation strategies for solving the problems of this kind. Limited by the space and language materials, the study is oriented to the translation of CSI at the level of words or phrases, leaving the translation of sentences and discourses unexplored. Its main academic contributions are as follows: Based on the translating strategies proposed by Aixela and Functionalist Approaches, this dissertation has devoted a proportional space to dealing with the characteristics of the translation of related CSIs at the level of words or phrases and how and why to choose the corresponding strategies.This dissertation also points out that there still remains a large room in this field for further studies from the vision of the translation theories that branch out from linguistics and cross-culture communications.