A Case-based Study Of Political Term Translation: Principles And Applications

Political terms are regarded as an effective vehicle for spreading political thoughts.Appropriate translation of political terms can promote international orintergovernmental communication, cooperation, understanding and trust. Therefore,taking the ISO/FDIS704Terminology Work—Principles and Methods as the practicalbasis, this study carries out a research on the political term translation in the2011Government Work Report from the perspective of terminology. First of all, the studycollects104political terms from the2011Government Work Report, including25terms in the conceptual field of “制度”(zhidu),33terms in the conceptual field of “改革”(gaige),9terms in the conceptual field of “战略”(zhanlüe) and other37typicalpolitical terms. Next, the study analyzes the concept systems in these conceptual fieldsin order to help the translators to have a better understanding of the concept relationsso that the translations would be more scientific and standard. Then, based on theISO/FDIS704Terminology Work—Principles and Methods, the study makes anassessment of the translations of the terms collected according to the prescribedprinciples including transparency, consistency, appropriateness, linguistic economy,derivability, linguistic correctness and preference for native language, and somerevised translations are proposed as well. Different from the linguistic approach usedin the previous studies, the study employs the method of terminology in the presentresearch in an attempt to improve the assessment system of term translation, provide aprinciple framework for political term translation, and make some contributions to thedeconstruction, reproduction and dissemination of political terms.