On Translational Norms In Translation Of Redundancy In Chinese Political Discourse

The thesis studies the translation of redundancy in Chinese political discourse within the theoretical framework of Gidean Toury's translational norms theory. Government Work Report of 2010 is chosen for a case study.For a long time, most translation theories are concerned with prescriptive approach to translation, concentrating on evaluating the quality of translation and formulating the restrictive guidelines on how to translate. Nevertheless, in recent years, many scholars have extended their view to the target language and culture, regarding translation as a historical and cultural activity. They are trying to explore translation in a new approach—descriptive approach. Different from the prescriptive approach to translation, descriptive approach focuses on describing what the translator has done, in other words, it focuses on describing the translation activity in an objective way. Toury's translational norms theory is closely related to such an approach; the theory mainly describes how the norms govern the translation activity. According to Toury, translation is an activity governed by various norms. Translational norms exist on every stage of the translating process and influence every lay-out of the translation product. The translation of redundancy in Chinese political discourse is no exception and it is also governed by translational norms. The thesis is to discover and justify how the norms govern the translation of redundancy in Chinese political discourse. Since Government Work Report of 2010 is very representative of Chinese political discourse, it is chosen for a case study.The author categorizes redundancy in Government Work Report of 2010 at lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level, and has made a data analysis about redundancy at each level. Then Toury's translational norms theory will be adopted to analyze the translation of redundancy in the Report. In Toury's theoretical rationale, there are different norms operating at different stages of the translation process such as preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. This thesis attempts to dig out those three norms and analyze how those norms govern the translator's choices in translating redundancy.Preliminary norms are concerned with translation policy and directness of translation. It involves the decision of what text to be translated. China is in need of publicizing the country to the outside world. As a kind of nice publicity material, the Government Work Report is chosen to be translated to enhance international communication and thus to boost the country's economy. Initial norms govern the translator's tendency towards two alternatives—"adequacy" or "acceptability". Although Toury sets translation in the target culture system and puts more emphasis on acceptability, he points out that no translation is entirely acceptable to target culture, nor is entirely adequate to the original work. The translator will always strike a balance between the two extremes (adequacy and acceptance) implied by the initial norms. Based on a data analysis of translation of redundancy, the author has found out that in translating redundancy, the translator takes acceptability as its priority considering the purpose of translating political discourse. However, due to a high sense of political responsibility, the translator would adhere to adequacy on few occasions. Functioning at a micro-level, operational norms direct the decision-making process during the translation. Since the translator takes "acceptability" as initial norm, the translator would take target readers and culture into consideration. Actually, there are several operational norms that govern the translation of redundancy, like the expectation of the target readers and the expressing convention of the target readers. The thesis has described how the translator deal with various redundancies like category words, four-character overlapping structures, redundant structural words, excessive modifiers, repetition and some other redundancies under the constraint of operational norms.Theoretically, the research diversifies the research of translational norms theory in non-literary field. Practically, through analyzing the translated product from the angle of translational norms, we can have a better understanding of translation of redundancy in Government Work Report of 2010 done by the translator under certain social and cultural background. This will enlighten us in understanding the translational norms when translating works in a similar context. Therefore, the thesis will be contributive to translation of Chinese political discourses.