A Corpus-based Study Of Some Linguistic Features In The English Translation Of Reports On The Work Of The Government

Since entering the new century, the reform and opening up of China has been further deepened, and its international communication has become increasingly frequent. China’s influence on the world politics and economic life has been widened day by day, which also makes China more and more remarkable in the international arena. The annual Report on the Work of the Government (RWG) is the work summary and work plans of Chinese government. It has profound significance to the development of China, and it is an important way of foreign publicity. It is authoritative source for the outside world to learn Chinese politics, economy and culture. Therefore, the translation of RWG plays an important role in the communication and development between China and foreign countries.From the perspective of style, the RWG belongs to political comment style. It has distinctive features, which are mainly reflected in the following aspects:Firstly, from the point of view of form, it is delivered orally by the premier of the State Council at each year’s plenary session of the National People Congress, but its content was carefully revised; Secondly, as for the content, the RWG relates to the government’s work of the past year and the plans for this year, and government’s self-improvement and so on, the language of which is precise and accurate, with striking written language features; Thirdly, as for the degree of formality, it is very formal official document. These features require the translators adhere to the original text and make sure that the translation of RWG shares the same language features with the original text.At present, there are more and more researches on the translation of RWG in our country, but most of them aim at a single text of one certain year, making qualitative analysis at lexical and syntactic levels. Studies of whether the English translation of RWG fits the usage habits of native readers, or whether the translated version is accepted by native speakers is rare involved. This study uses the RWG bilingual parallel corpus and the State of the Union addresses (SUA) corpus, and applies the corpus-based analysis method to study at lexical and syntactic levels. It aims to find out the differences between them, and explore the possible reasons leading to the differences. At the lexical level, there are five aspects to be dealt with:mean word length, lexical density, standardized type/token ratio, high frequency words and nominalization; At the syntactic level, there are four points to be dealt with:the number of sentences, average sentence length and its standard deviation, passive voice and the proportion of complex sentences. The results of the research summarize some linguistic features of English translations of RWGs, and this study also puts forward some suggestions for the future translation of RWG...