A Study Of The Translation Of Chinese Speeches From The Perspective Of Reiss’s Theory On Text Typology As Exemplified By Mo Yan’s Nobel Lecture

This thesis intends to find out how to echo the artistic quality and aesthetic sentiment in the English translation version of Chinese academic speeches as exemplified by Mo Yan’s Nobel lecture in 2012, a form-focused text based on the classification of Reiss’s text typology.Academic speech, being a special and strict speech type, as its name suggests, is a kind of speech to exchange and disseminate scientific knowledge, academic views and research findings with the features of academic, creative and exoteric.In the light of Reiss, a German scholar’s theory on text typology, texts can be divided into three types:the content-focused text, the form-focused text and the appeal-focused text on the basis of language’s three communicative functions:representative, expressive and appellative. Reiss further notes that the whole of a text will not always be dedicated exclusively to a single function but have constant combinations and overlapping in the actual practice with a dominant function in this complexity and that the text type determines the translation strategies, which means different types of text need different translation strategies.Mo Yan’s Nobel lecture in 2012 can be regarded as a dominant form-focused text with the content-focused and appeal-focused text as supplements. When translating, Goldblatt has perfectly reproduced its original aesthetic effect and artistic forms. Therefore, in the translation of Chinese academic speeches which are the same type as this Nobel lecture under discussion, the translators should translate under the guidance of translation principles:correspondence in style, equivalence in semantics, adequacy in diction and correctness in grammar for linguistic elements, and affection enhancement for extra-linguistic elements, and of translation strategies which are amplification and omission, division and negation, conversion and inversion, substitution and conjunction, and comprehensive translation at according levels.