A Research On The C-E Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Report On The Work Of The Goverment From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With major new achievements made in the reform and opening-up as well as socialist modernization, China takes another steady step in raising her international standing and influence, which turns out to be a great historical success. People all over the world are increasingly keen on learning more about China, including her political policies, economic situations and future plans. At the same time, China is willing to be known to the outside world in order to make herself understood in all aspects. The annual Report on the Work of the Government (hereinafter called GWR) is delivered to the People s Congress, looking back on the performance of the Chinese government during last year or the past five years and outlining the plans for the future development in politics, economy, culture, and education etc. It will surely present the most authoritative and important source of information about the current situation in China. GWR has unique language characteristics such as formal diction, plain and precise language, using Chinese culture-loaded terms, four-character phrases and parallelism sentences. Therefore, the GWR translation plays an unusually important role in transmitting the information in GWR to the rest of the world. Studies on the translation of Chinese traditional classics into English can help improve the influence of the Chinese traditional culture in the world. However, the wide gap between Chinese and the western culture produces great difficulties in translations. And this is obviously shown in translations on the lexical level, i.e. the translation of culture-loaded words.This thesis studies the translation of GWR from the perspective of Verschueren’s adaptation theory. By theoretical deduction and data analysis, it manifests the adaptation process of the translator in the translation of the culture-loaded words in GWRs, which offers a new theoretical perspective for GWR translation. Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory carries out a new pragmatic perspective for language use and translation research. He points out that by using the three properties of language, that is, variability, negotiability and adaptability; language must consist of the continuous making choices. Translation is a process of using language, and meanwhile a process of making choices. Therefore, it is reasonable to study GWR translation based on the adaptation theory. The four research aspects of language communication carried out in the theory are applied to examine the translation operation. The aim is to find out the impact of context factors on choice-making and dynamic adaptation in the translation process.The whole thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One serves as an introductory part. It presents rationale and significance, objectives and hypothesis, and questions of the research.Chapter Two is the literature review. It mainly consists of three sections:the first section is research on the adaptation theory; the second section is research on the Chinese culture-loaded words; the third section is research on GWRs,Chapter Three is the data collection and research methodology.Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis which analyzes four categories of culture-loaded words, and makes a contrastive analysis of the translations of the culture-loaded words in GWRs at the perspective of adaptation theory. There are four parts in this chapter, culture-loaded words related to ecological culture, culture-loaded words related to linguistic culture, culture-loaded words related to material culture, culture-loaded words related to social culture. This chapter will have a thorough analysis about each kind of culture-loaded words, and will make a contrastive discussion of its two corresponding English versions from the perspective of relevance theory.Chapter Five summarizes the methods employed by the translators when dealing with culture-loaded words, including literal translation, literal translation plus explanation, substitution, amplification, omission and paraphrasing.Chapter Six is the conclusion which states the major findings and limitations of this study.To sum up, the thesis discusses that how to analyze and translate the culture-loaded words in GWRs from the perspective of adaptation theory, so as to provide some research methods for the culture-loaded words translation in GWRs.