On Translation Of China’s White Papers From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Political writings can represent the stance of the government, and some basic policiesmay be shown in political writings. So the translation of political writings has been anessential means to promote the social, political and cultural communications betweenChina and other countries. Translating political writings has aroused great interest in thetranslation field. Previous researchers mainly studied the translation of political writingsfrom the lexical level and the syntactical level. The discourse level was seldom involved.So in this sense, the previous researches are not complete enough. In this thesis,Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is applied as the theoretical framework for studying thetranslation of the white paper China’s Peaceful Development from linguistic context andnon-linguistic context. Adaptation to linguistic context is mainly studied from the lexical,syntactical and discourse levels, trying to offer some enlightenment for the translation ofpolitical writings.Firstly, this thesis concludes the previous researches on Adaptation Theory and thetranslation of political writings home and abroad. Then, taking China’s PeacefulDevelopment as an example, this thesis talks about the language features of politicalwritings, including the lexical, syntactical and discourse features. Under the guidance ofAdaptation Theory, this thesis studies the translation of the white paper China’s PeacefulDevelopment from linguistic context and non-linguistic context. Adaptation to linguisticcontext is mainly studied from the lexical, syntactical and discourse levels. According toAdaptation Theory, during the C-E translation of political writings, the translator shouldmake some adjustments to deal with the redundancy of words, the multiple pre-modifiers,long sentences, sentences with no subject and the cohesion of discourse, so as to adapt tothe language structure of English. The non-linguistic context mainly contains the socialworld, the physical world and the mental world. This thesis discusses how the non-linguistic context is applied in the translation of the white paper China’s PeacefulDevelopment from the social world, the physical world and the mental world. As to thesocial world, this thesis focuses on the study of cultural adaptation and economicadaptation. Adaptation to the physical world is studied from two dimensions: the time andthe space. As for the mental world, this thesis puts its emphasis on adaptation to theemotions and aesthetic expectations of the target receptors. After studying the C-Etranslation of the white paper China’s Peaceful Development, the thesis comes to aconclusion: translation is in fact a dynamic process of making linguistic choices. Only thetranslation adapts to the linguistic context and non-linguistic context, can thecross-cultural communication be successfully realized.