The Analysis Of Political Speech Translation In The Framework Of Adaptation Theory

With the deepening of the opening up policy, more and more attention from the foreigners has been shifted to China. However, for most westerners, China is an ancient country with long history, and at the same time, there exist some prejudices and misunderstandings of our countries, resulting in communication barriers of politics, economy and culture among nations. In order to get rid of the obstacles of this communication, we should present more of our country to the other world.As the carrier of information and culture, the translation of political speeches plays a vital role in the international communication, and it is the bridge for the foreigners to gain a better understanding of the socialism country with distinctive Chinese characteristics, helping to strengthen the friendly relationship, promoting the trade contacts, establishing a good image on the international stage. However, the previous studies on political speeches have focused on summarizing the approaches and skills of the C-E translation of political speeches, which lacks the guidance of the theory. Besides, the research lacks in analyzing all the factors influence the translation of political speeches. As a special cross-culture communication, the translation of political materials requires the translator to make different choices and adaptations.As far as the author is concerned, there involve two different transformations of language, namely, making choices on the inner and exterior layers. The source language and target language possesses the property of variability, negotiability and adaptability. The inner factor of language refers to the linguistic structural layers, such as the lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level. The exterior factors involve the non-linguistic factors, namely, communicative context, including physical world, mental world and social world.This study firstly makes an overview of the previous study in this field, and then makes a summary of the features and the requirements of political translation, further the integration of the adaptation theory and the practice of C-E (Chinese-English) translation of the political speeches are also concerned. At the same time, in the framework of the adaptation theory, this research makes a comprehensive analysis of all the different but related factors that influence the political speech translation. This thesis attempts to adopt the rising theory, pragmatic theory to analyze the translation of political speeches. Jef Verschueren put forward the theory that the choice of language use is made out of the internal and external factors to achieve the communicative aims in the continuous process of making choices. Adaptability is one of the properties of language, and the ultimate goal of making adaptation is to obtain a successful communication. In the meanwhile, this thesis makes a qualitative analysis of the data collection from the authoritative website, explaining the methods that the translator makes adaptation to the translation materials. Then, from the analysis in the previous part, the author draws a conclusion:the translation of political materials is a continuous process of making choices and adaptation, and the translator should not only make adaptation on the linguistic level but also make adaptation to the target language audience, including the mental world, social world and physical world. In this process, the translator can select the appropriate approaches of translation.This thesis aims to provide a brand new perspective for the study in this field, in the hope of offering some enlightment and guidance in the work of C-E translation political speeches to achieve a better and more successful communication.