A Study Of The Translation Of2012Report On The Work Of The Government From The Perspective Of Functionalist Skopos Theory

With constantly enhancing international status, China’s development has aroused world-wide attention. More people are eager to learn about China’s social and economic development. From China’s part, in order to better integrate into the world and earn international understanding and support, China needs to publicize its profound culture to the outside world so that the international community can have a comprehensive, accurate, and timely understanding of China. Annual Report on the Work of the Government (RWG) summarizes the work of the government in the previous year and maps out plans for the next year, covering aspects concerning China’s overall development like politics, economy, culture, education, people’s wellbeing, and national defense, etc. It represents one of the most important and authoritative resources for the world to learn about China’s status quo and policies. Therefore, the translation of RWG plays a decisive role.However, previous studies focus more on the contrastive analysis of the English translation with its corresponding source text. The researches on the unique linguistic features of RWG, translation problems occurring during translation process and its responding strategies are far from sufficient. Besides, most studies are experience-oriented, lacking theoretical support.Functionalist Skopos Theory (FST), with Reisse, Vermeer, Manttari, and Nord as its representatives, was initiated in1970s and is undergoing constant improvement and development. FST regards translation as a purpose-driven intercultural communication action. It highlights the influence of translation purpose on translation and has a powerful explanatory power on translation practice. Based on the main ideas of FST, the thesis makes a comprehensive analysis on the translation purpose of RWG, the influence of translation purpose on translation strategies, major translation problems at lexical, syntactic, and textual level, and the corresponding translation strategies. By doing so, the author hopes to provides reference to translators engaged in translation of political texts, to help them better understand the translation objects that they deal with and make use of flexible translation strategies to deal with specific translation problem, and to make slight contributions to the researches on improving the translation quality of political...