On The C-E Translation Of Political Essays In The New From The Perspective Of Functionalism Theory

Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, China has made great progress in the development of economy, politics, culture and foreign affairs. More and more exchanges and cooperation between China and foreign countries have taken place in various fields and people from abroad would like to have a vivid and precise image of China which urges China to introduce and popularize itself to the world by every means and to set up a good image in the international community. Only through correct translation can translators present a better idea of China to foreigners, as political essays can reflect the contemporary China in various aspects, it is crucial to produce translation of political writings with high quality. However, a sole method is one-sided and cannot achieve that aim.Functionalism is a broad term for various theories that approach translation by focusing on the functions of source texts and target texts. As a result, this thesis is in an attempt to apply functionalism to C-E translation of political essays and prove its feasibility by analyzing the Chinese and English versions of Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Volumeâ…¢. This book not only reflects common characteristics of political essays but also possess its own characteristics. With respect to the former, the distinctive features of the style of political essays in China should be its frequent use of big words and political jargons in terms of vocabulary which symbolize authority and solemnity, slogan-type sentences together with repetition, antithesis and parallelism at syntactic level which take the form of strong appeal to the mass. Regarding the latter, this book reflects features of Deng Xiaoping style, for instance, frequent use of colloquial vocabulary, ellipsis and monosyllables at lexical level, combination of negative and affirmative sentences, question-answer sentences and rhetoric questions at syntactic level as well as some rhetoric features. As a result, while translating Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Volumeâ…¢with strong features of Deng Xiaoping style, the translator should bear in mind its common and special characteristics and employ appropriate strategies to provide the target receptors with a high-quality translation.At first, the author presents a literature review of what have been analyzed in the field of the translation of political essays so far and the limitations of those analyses as well as the significance of the thesis. Secondly, the author demonstrates the theoretical framework of the thesis: functionalism. An overview of functionalism is presented; its major rules such as skopos rule, intratextual coherence, intertextual coherence as well as functions plus loyalty rule, are demonstrated. Then the author analyzes enlightenment of functionalism on translation of political essays from the aspects of the translator in translating, translation brief, the role of source-text analysis, the skopos of political essays translation and strategies applied to political translation from the perspective of functionalism. After that, the author probes into a case study on Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Volumeâ…¢from its characteristics at lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels and translation strategies employed according to functionalism.The conclusion of this thesis is that functionalism is a feasible translation criterion. Taking functionalism as the theoretical guidance of translation of political essays into English can help to improve the translation quality and demonstrate that functionalism plays a guiding part in the C-E translation of political essays in the new era.