A Study Of The Inlfuences Of Political Factors On The Translation Of Political Texts From The Persective Of Critical Discourse Analsis

This thesis aims to conduct a study on the translation of political texts from the perspective of criticaldiscourse analysis (CDA). The translation of the Report on the Work of the Government (RWG) in2011istaken for data analysis. Adopting Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoreticalframework, this thesis applies lexical classification, transformation and modality in M.A.K. Halliday’ssystemic-functional grammar (SFG) as analytical tools for a comparative analysis on the translation ofRWG in order to find out whether and how socio-political factors affect the translation of political texts.The study first makes a comparison on the linguistic features of the source text and the target text inlexical classification, transformation and modality in Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar from theperspective of CDA to identify the changes in the translated version in these aspects. The production,distribution and consumption of these shifts in the texts are analyzed. Then the research continues toanalyze the socio-political contexts in which the source text and the target text are produced to provide anexplanation for the choices at the first two levels of the texts and the discursive practice. The analysis of thesocio-political contexts helps to reveal how socio-political factors influence the choices of linguisticstructure in translation, thus to demonstrate how political manipulation is realized through selection ofdifferent linguistic forms in the translation of RWG and how the translation sustains the political power inthe society through the selection of linguistic forms.Based on the previous analysis, we draw a conclusion that the choices of linguistic structure in thetranslation process are by no means involuntary, they are influenced by socio-political factors, and at thesame time the translation also sustains certain social structure.