A Functionalist Approach To The C-E Translation Of China’s Actions For Disaster Prevention And Reduction

The White Paper of the Chinese Government released by Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China plays a significant role in promoting understanding and recognition of international community towards China’s national situation, principles and policies. The political status and stylistic features of the White Paper determines the specific characteristics and skills in its translation. Due to the stylistic and Chinese-English linguistic disparities, translation for the White Paper is different from literature works, and should be applied with specific translation skills and methods to improve its faithfulness.Seeking connection between source text and target text from the functional view, School of functional translation theory combines text typology and text function with the translation methods, and proposes the interaction and definition of text function and Skopos theory, in which offers certain guidance for government White Papers. This thesis attempts to take China’s Actions for Disaster Prevention and Reduction released on2009as a study case, based on the functionalism and its core theory of the text typology and Skopos theory, to analyses the translation of China’s Actions for Disaster Prevention and Reduction from the lexical, syntactical, and textual levels, and in light of methods of theory applied in examples and under the guidance of text type, translation Skopos and target readers, to propose and explore reasonable translation principles for the White Paper. Namely:1. the social and cultural characteristics of the White Paper demands translator to choose and identify proper translation skills;2. Skopos theory could be used as an effective way and theoretical basis for translation of government documents;3. utilization of functional theory approaches will be conducive for political correctiveness and faithfulness in White Paper translation.