On Translation Of Chinese Political Terms From The Perspective Of Memetics

Chinese political terms reflect China’s domestic and foreign policies and greatlyhelp the world to get a comprehensive understanding of China’s national conditionsand social development. Therefore, a correct comprehension and translation of Chinesepolitical terms is of great importance for China’s international intercourse,communication and cooperation.As a new theory which explicates the law of cultural evolution, memetics on whichthe researches are conducted in different fields is still under development now in China.This thesis, based on memetics, explains and analyzes the translation of Chinesepolitical terms from a comparatively different perspective. A theoretical framework forthe analysis of Chinese political terms translation is established in the thesis on thebasis of Francis Heylighen’s concept of meme selection criteria and replicationthrough an organic combination of memetics and translations studies of Chinesepolitical terms, from which we can obtain a new or different inspiration.An introduction of the concept of memes to the analysis of Chinese political termsshows that a Chinese political term or its translation version can be regarded as ameme, namely, a political term meme and the translation of Chinese political terms canbe taken as the process of replicating and transmitting strong political term memesfrom the source language to the target language. On the basis of analysis of thecharacteristics and classification of Chinese political term memes, combined with thefeatures, selection criteria and transmission mode of successful memes, this thesissuggests that translators should stick to the principles of faithfulness, conciseness andunderstandability and try to create strong translated memes by adopting such effectivetranslation strategies in the translation process as finding English equivalents ofChinese political terms, introducing Chinese memes to English and changing Chinesepolitical terms into idiomatic English expression, aiming to provide high-quality modelEnglish versions of Chinese political terms. This research indicates the feasibility ofthe application of memetics to the illustration and analysis of Chinese political termstranslation.