A Study On C-E Translation Of Chinese-specific Terms In Government Work Report From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As the most authoritative political text in China, the annual Chinese Government Work Report(hereinafter called GWR) is an all-embracing vision of China, which becomes a major source and channel for foreigners to get a complete picture of social development of China. Therefore, the translation of the GWR is highly significant in international publicity for the promotion of mutual understanding between China and the rest of the world. The translation of the GWR definitely involves the translation of terms, which is an essential prerequisite for a successful translation. There are a large number of Chinese-specific terms in GWRs, which are the products in the Chinese-specific context. Hence, the improvement in the quality of Chinese-specific terms translation in GWRs is a major determinant to the effect on the mutual understanding in international publicity. Most traditional studies on C-E translation of Chinese-specific terms are based on personal translating experience or guided by corresponding translation theory instead of from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics.Relevance Theory puts emphasis on human cognition and communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. The theoretical value of Relevance Theory depends on its comparison of human communication to an ostensive-inferential process with the purpose of achieving mutual manifestness. In the light of Relevance Theory, translation, as an inter-lingual communication, is regarded as a dual ostensive-inferential process, which aims to pursue optimal relevance and mutual manifestness between communicators.All the examples of Chinese-specific terms in this thesis are selected from GWRs from the year of 2003 to 2015. This thesis aims to explore and analysis the process of Chinese-specific terms translation in GWRs from the perspective of Relevance Theory by mainly giving answers to the following questions:(1) What are the ways to describe and analysis the process of translation of Chinese-specific terms under the framework of Relevance Theory?(2) What objectives of the translator in the process of Chinese-specific terms translation attempt to achieve under the guidance of Relevance Theory?(3) What kinds of basic principles and strategies for C-E translation of Chinese-specific terms in political texts according to Relevance Theory? By doing this, the results can be presented as follows:(1) The C-E translation of Chinese-specific terms can be regarded as a dual ostensive-inferential process with a triangle relationship between the original writer, the translator and the target foreign audiences.(2) The general goal of the translator in the process of Chinese-specific terms translation is to search optimal relevance and achieve mutual manifestness between the original writer and the target reader on the basis of an appropriate evaluation of their cognitive environment.(3) This paper concludes mainly four basic principles(fidelity, cross-culture, context, political sensitivity) and two categories of relevance-theoretic translation strategies, namely direct translation(literal translation, annotation) and indirect translation(paraphrase, substitution) for C-E translation of Chinese-specific terms. This thesis hopes to shed some light on the Chinese-specific terms translation study from the perspective cognitive pragmatics and improve the quality of Chinese-specific terms translation for a better mutual understanding in international publicity.