| With the continuous advance of globalization, the trend for internationalization becomes overwhelming. To conform to this trend and keep up with the times, China has been actively promoting the policies of reform and opening up and has now become the second largest economy in the world. Unprecedented interactions have been developed between China and various countries and regions in the world. However, successful and effective foreign exchanges can never be accomplished without successful foreign affairs translation. The significant role of foreign affairs translation, whose scope expands from national security to cultural exchange activities, is self-evident for all countries and regions in the world.In China, foreign affairs translation has always enjoyed a top priority over other types of translation activities. Translators of foreign affairs documents have integrated a large number of translating knowledge gained in their translation practices. In light of the fact that articles on a systematic elaboration of translation for foreign affairs documents are barely seen in China and that those exist now only focus on some skills or errors committed during the translation of foreign affairs documents, which are not systematic enough. Therefore, to establish a complete theoretical framework for foreign affairs translation is an arduous task and the road ahead is long.This thesis is aiming to conduct a relatively complete and systematic exploration to the translation for foreign affairs documents and to propose some appropriate strategies for it under the guidance of the Skopos Theory. The thesis tries to answer the following questions:(1) What is the definition of foreign affairs documents translation and what are the unique characteristics of it? (2) Whether it is feasible to employ the Skopos Theory as the guidance of foreign affairs documents translation?(3) What kind of criteria needs to be observed during the translation of foreign affairs documents?(4) What are the optimized translation strategies for different types of foreign affairs documents?As to the design of this thesis, it is composed of five chapters. Chapter one provides a general introduction and makes an initial exploration to the framework of this thesis, including the purpose, the significance and the layout of this research. Chapter two is designed for literature review. It presents an elaborate introduction to foreign affairs documents and Vermeer’s Skopos Theory. This part devotes to a detailed account of the foreign affairs documents covering the definition, characteristics and the classification of foreign affairs documents. Foreign affairs translation can be simply defined as language conversion during the activities which the diplomatic department or agencies carry out with the governments of other states or their authorities, international organizations and institutions. Foreign affairs documents mainly contains diplomatic statements, communique, agreements, correspondence between countries and the speeches delivered on a variety of foreign affairs occasions. The nature of foreign affairs documents attributes to their distinctive features, i.e., strong political and policy sensitivity, accuracy, measured wording and high degree of confidentiality. China, a large socialist developing country which suffered the invasion, oppression and bullying of the imperialist powers and finally achieved complete liberation, has some unique features in its foreign affairs language—the combination of explicitness and implicitness. Besides, the Skopos Theory, the guiding theory of this paper is also expounded in detail, including the evolution, main beliefs, three dominating rules and two translation standards within the framework of the Skopos theory. Chapter three explains the research methodology from the perspectives of data collection, research design, data analysis and analysis procedures. Chapter four, the highlight of this thesis, concentrates on the application of the Skopos Theory to foreign affairs translation through case studies. First, foreign affairs documents are divided into three categories based on the Text Typology. The majority of foreign affairs documents usually possesses two or more kinds of communicative functions and thus has the characteristics of at least two text types. For instance, the diplomatic documents such as the diplomatic communiques belong to both "expressive" and "informative" functional texts. Second, the translation of typical Chinese foreign affairs documents is analyzed comparatively based on the three basic rules of the Skopos Theory—the Skopos Rule, the Coherence Rule and the Fidelity Rule. The Skopos Rule serves as the top-ranking rule in the framework of the Skopos Theory, which signifies that the whole translation process should conform to the specified translation purpose and the target texts should possess the functions desired by the translators or the translation initiator. In this section, the author takes the Press Communique of the Head of Delegation Meeting of the Sixth Round of the Six-Party Talks and the Communique on the Establishment of Sino-U.S. Diplomatic Relations as examples to expound in detail the application of the Skopos Rule in foreign affairs translation. The Coherence Rule demands that the target text should be intelligible for its readers and should be meaningful in light of the communicative situation and cultural background of the target readers. In this section, the author applies the Coherence Rule to the translation on foreign affairs documents from two perspectives—orientation to target readers’linguistic conventions and orientation to target readers’ cultural conventions. The Fidelity Rule refers to the inter-textual coherence between the source text and the target text. Since most of foreign affairs documents are featured with political sensitivity, being faithful to the original text is the basic way to express the precise political implications in the target text. In this section, the author also applies the Fidelity Rule to the translation on foreign affairs documents from two perspectives—being faithful to the meaning of the words in the source text and being faithful to the intention of the source text. In order to expound the relationship among these three rules, the author takes the speech delivered by Chairman Hu Jintao in Yale University in the year2006as the example and analyzes it through the parallel corpus analysis method. Third, basic translation criteria and strategies for each type of foreign affairs documents are proposed in accordance with the analysis results. The translation criteria consist of three elements, that is, the translation purpose, the intelligibility of the target text and the fidelity of the target text. The strategies for different types of foreign affairs documents are as follows:(1) Strategies of dual transformation between Hypotaxis and Parataxis for the expressive foreign affairs texts.(2) Strategies of semantic translation for the informative foreign affairs texts.(3) Strategies of communicative translation for the vocative foreign affairs texts. Chapter five comes to the conclusion of this thesis, containing an overview of the previous parts, the finding of this study, some specific limitations of this study and several particular suggestions for further research. |
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