The Chinese-to-English Translation Of Political Documents From The Perspective Of Functionalist Translation Theories

The international community has gained an increasing understanding about China alongwith its international rising status both in the international affairs and in the economic world.The English translation of Chinese political documents has become a very crucial channel forthe outside publicity. The current researches on the English-translation of political documentsare far from satisfaction in the sense that a working theoretical framework for the translatingis still to be investigated. Therefore, a theoretical consideration into the English-translation ofpolitical documents is great of significance.The thesis has explored the English-translation of political documents under Nord’sfunctionalist theory with the Report on the Work of the Government in2011as the case study.It aims at justifying the feasibility of Nord’s model for the translation of political documentsand at the same time, working out solutions to the translation problems so as to improve thetranslation quality of political documents.The thesis has addressed the translational problems from the three key aspects ofNord’s theory, namely:“translation brief”,“source-text analysis”, and “identify translationalproblems”, which are the most important and needed three aspects when taking a translationtask. The purpose for the analysis in these three aspects is to identify the objectivetranslational difficulties. The comparing analysis between the source text and target text willbe carried out in the whole paper. It has addressed the pragmatic, cultural, linguistic andtext-specific translational problems and has explored the specific translation procedures forthe Chinese-to-English translation of political documents. We maintain that the translation ofpolitical document is documentary translation and its’ main text function is informative. It isrequired that the translator should have a strong sense of politics and should take faithfulnessand fluency into full account. In translating, the translator should pay attention to the politicalbackground knowledge and the accurate understanding of political issues. At the same time,the acceptability of the target text also should be taken into account. The proposed specifictranslation procedures include literal translation, descriptive equivalent, philologicaltranslation, deletion and expansion. All these translation procedures aim to make the translated text faithful, fluent and idiomatic so as to achieve the outside publicity andcommunication.