A Corpus-based Study On C-E Translation Of Political Writings

Political writing, including speeches made by political leaders and guiding principles and policies of the country, plays a significant role in burnishing country’s international image and protecting sovereignty. With the continuous implementation of the Opening and Reform policy and the acceleration of global integration, China is involved in more and more international affairs. Meanwhile, the relation between China and other countries becomes closer and closer. Therefore the study of C-E translation of political writing, especially(hereinafter, Annual Government Report is referred to as GR, its English edition referred to as GRE and its Chinese edition referred to as GRC), becomes a new research hotspot.Translation difficulties are triggered by various differences in linguistic and social cultures. For political writings, every year, there will be many new terms with national political and social characteristics, which are very difficult for foreign readers to understand. What’s more, the translation of political writing needs to be much more careful than other translation, because a minor mistake may cause political problems.Concerning C-E translation of political writings, there are a lot of researches made at home and abroad. The essay entitled My Views of C-E Translation of Political Writings, written by famous translator Chen Zhenqiu, started the research of C-E translation of political writing in China. However, the majority of these researches focus on translation quality, translation target and linguistic features of the translation based on translation experience.In this thesis, three research questions will be discussed:1) What are the linguistic features of the translation of Chinese political writings at lexical and syntactical level?2) What are the reasons for these translation phenomena?3) Is there any improper translation?To explore these three questions, the thesis uses comparative and corpus-based research methods. And two corpora have been built: 1) parallel corpus, namely GRE and GRC from 2010-2014; 2) monolinguial corpus, namely, SU(hereinafter referred to as SU) from 2010-2014.Based on contrastive analysis, it is not hard to find out that GRE has higher lexical density but lower lexical diversity compared with SU, which results from high proportion of adjective, adverb, noun and personal pronoun. Reasons for high proportion of these content words are presented as follows:1) The different thinking modes of Westerner and Chinese, difference between synthetic language and analytic language, and the introduction of new terms lead to high proportion of modifiers; and some translations of modifiers are improper;2)Since in GRC,there are lots of“我们”literally translated into“we”and many no-subject sentences have been added subject“we”during translation,the proportion of“we”in GRE is much higher than that in SU;3) Nominalization rate of GRE is higher than that of SU which increases reading difficulty for target readers and increases the mean sentence length.At syntactic level, the research finds out that:1) Sentences in GRC are very long, and there are many coordinating structures in GRE. Meanwhile, English is complex in sentence structure while Chinese sentence structure is simple. All these result in longer mean sentence length of GRE.2) However, the sentence structure of GRE is simpler than that of SU, lacking subordinating structure.3) The no-subject sentence is widely used in GRC, while most of them have been added subject “we”, and only a few of them are translated into passive voice sentences. Therefore, the translation strategy for no-subject sentence lacks flexibility.4) Last but not least, compared with other forms of political writing, GR and SU are not official in form, and they shall build a close relation with target readers to resonate with them. That’s why there are fewer passive voice sentences in both GRE and SU.During translation, unnecessary modifier merits special attention. The translator needs to avoid literal translation of original text. Then, the proportion of nominalization shall also be reduced, especially for some unnecessary difficult long words, to help the target readers understand the text. What’s more, the translator shall use various sentence types instead of using too much coordinating structure.This thesis may offer some practical suggestions for C-E translation of political writings. Owing to the small amount of the data collected by the study, the findings have many limits.