A Study On The Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese-English Translation Of Chinese Government Work Report

The concept of “grammatical metaphor” was put forward by Halliday in AnIntroduction to Functional Grammar in1985. He points that metaphor does notconfined to the variation in the lexical level, but also refers to the variation in thegrammatical forms. Those metaphors in the grammatical forms are the grammaticalmetaphors. Halliday proves that the high frequency of the grammatical metaphor ofnominalization is the characteristic of the scientific discourses, as well as all theformal texts. There are few researches on the grammatical metaphors in the politicaltext, therefore the writer makes an exploration to study the translation of thegrammatical metaphors in the2011Chinese Government Work Report (GWR).The GWR is published on March5th, during the National People’s Congress and theChinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. It summarizes all achievementsin socialist development and publishes all fundamental policies based on China’snational conditions. It concerns the politics, economy, agriculture, education,medicine and diplomacy, and all aspects at national interest and livelihood. The2011GWR consists of three parts:1) review of national economic and social developmentduring the eleventh five-year plan period;2) main objectives;3) tasks for the twelfthfive-year plan period and work for2011.Halliday divides the grammatical metaphor into the ideational metaphor and theinterpersonal metaphor. Then he develops a reclassification of the grammaticalmetaphor. There are the nominalization, the adjectivization, the verbalization and theadverbalization of the grammatical metaphor. Type1,2,3,4and11belong tonominalization of the grammatical metaphor, Type5,6,7and13belong toadjectivization, Type8,9and12belong to verbalization, while Type10belongs toadverbalization. This thesis focuses on the Chinese-English translation of theideational grammatical metaphors in the Chinese Government Work Report.The writer collects all the grammatical metaphors in the original and translated textof the GWR and makes a qualitative and quantitative study, and develops the following points:1) Grammatical metaphors in the translated text are more than thosein the original one.2) The grammatical metaphors of nominalization in the translatedtext are more than those in the original one, while the grammatical metaphors ofadjectivization in the original text are more than those in the translated text. Most ofthe grammatical metaphors in the original and translated text are the grammaticalmetaphors of nominalization and adjectivization.3) Both in the original and translatedtext, the grammatical metaphors of Type2is the most common one, followed by Type13. There are no Type4,7,9and11in the original text.The abundant use of grammatical metaphors makes the text more concise, objectiveand cohesive. The high frequency of grammatical metaphors of nominalization andadjectivization are the common characteristics of the original and translated text. Thegrammatical metaphors of adjectivization in the original text are more than those inthe translated text. That’s because in Chinese the nouns are modified by manyattributes.In the study of the translation of the2011GWR, for all types of grammaticalmetaphors other than Type5, most of the grammatical metaphors of each type aretranslated while maintaining the same type of grammatical metaphor.The thesis makes a qualitative and quantitative research on the translation of thegrammatical metaphors in the2011Government Work Report from the perspective ofHalliday’s Grammatical Theory. The writer hopes to supply some useful implicationsfor the translation of grammatical metaphors in political texts.