On Translation Of Long Sentences In Political Essays

With China’s rising international status, foreigners are increasingly concerned with China’s development and are eager to know more about its policies and standpoints. Such political writings as the government’s work reports introduce the political, economic, cultural and diplomatic development of China as well as its future planning, providing a good opportunity for foreign people to learn more about China. Therefore, it is of great significance to translate Chinese political essays in an appropriate way.This paper focuses on the C-E translation of long sentences in political essays. Based on the translation of Report on the Work of the Government in2012, the thesis tries to work out the strategies of translating long sentences in political writings. The author firstly makes an analysis of the three differences of long Chinese and English sentences:Chinese sentences have bamboo-pole structures while English sentences possess grape-cluster structures; Chinese is paratactic and English is hypotactic; long Chinese sentences are topic-prominent while English ones are subject-prominent. Then three principles of converting long Chinese sentences into English are presented:loyalty, accuracy and flexibility. These provide theoretical bases for putting forward the later translation methods. In the next part, the paper conducts contrastive analyses of the author’s translation of Report on the Work of the Government in2012and its authoritative version, and concludes with five translation strategies:following the original sentence order, changing the original order, division, combination and the use of multi-methods. What makes the paper different is that it classifies subordination as one case of combination and comes up with the method of rewriting and integrating, which is beneficial for the C-E translation of long sentences.