A Study Of C-E Translation Of Official Document From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The globalization of world economy has been sped up, which made the communication and connection between China and other countries in the world intensified. In this process, China needs to understand the outside world, and at the same time introduce itself to the outside world. As we all know, as the carrier and container of culture and other information of the nation, language reflect a wide scope of a people's aesthetics, beliefs, values, etc. Translation serves as a bridge between languages, which are the carrier of culture.There are many researches on the translation of other kind of materials, for example, the translation of news, news headlines, tourism text, publicity materials, etc., but the research on the translation of official document is not so popular. Hence the study of C-E translation of official document is quite necessary and significant. As a kind of cross-cultural communication, official document can be translated into many foreign languages, but considering English is the language most widely used in the world, this paper is focused on the C-E translation of official document. There are various kinds of official document, due to the limit of length of the present thesis, most of the data analyzed in it is selected from Report on the Work of the Government, which is one kind of official document published by the government of The People's Republic of China. Usually, it is divided into four parts: review of work in the past year, main tasks for the next year, government self-built and other things. As Report of the work of the government is a very authoritative document, many aspects of China are presented in it, and it is a good material for the foreigners to get to know China. Research on the C-E translation of official document should help improve the quality of English translation of the Chinese official document. Foreigners from various countries around the world can get to know China better through these documents. Though there are differences between official document and other materials in terms of translation, the achievement made by previous scholars and researches is made use of as reference and relevance.On the basis of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, this thesis analyzes the C-E translation of official document from the pragmatic perspective by introducing linguistic, physical, social and cultural factors into the C-E official document. The obstacles during the process of translation are still caused by the discrepancies between two different cultures. Translators should make some proper adaptation to the target reader's linguistic, physical, social, mental world. After giving an overview of official document, the thesis moves on to analyze the adaptation in the process of C-E translation of official document from four aspects: adaptation to the linguistic convention, adaptation to the mental world, adaptation to the physical world and adaptation to the social world.The present thesis views C-E translation of official document as a dynamic process of choice-making and adaptation with regard to linguistic convention and context at various levels of salience. This provides a pragmatic perspective to the research of C-E translation of official document. The thesis also provides some translation methods of official document, translators can choose from them to satisfy their needs. Because C-E of official document hasn't been studied so thoroughly, the author just hope this thesis can cast new light on researches into the C-E translation of official document and provide some guidance as well as insights for those devoted in this field.