A Study On The C-E Translation Of Government Work Reports From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Government Work Reports(GWRs) as proposed by the Premier of the Chinese government are vitally authentic sources for international communities to get access to Chinese policies, domestic development of China in previous year as well as plans for the following year; much attention and weight has been placed on the translation of the GWRs. As a formal document for political purpose, ideology seems to be an element which is by no way ignored during the process of translating the GWRs as well as in the researches on the GWRs. Taking the government work reports as proposed by Premier Li Keqiang in 2014 and 2015 as research subject, the present thesis intends to conduct a systematic research on the Chinese-English translation of the GWRs from the perspective of critical discourse analysis(CDA), with an intention to explore the innate relation between linguistic manifestation and ideology, and to examine how translator interprets the GWRs in an ideologically appropriate way.Based on a critical analysis on linguistic forms, CDA aims at uncovering ideological implications underlying linguistic forms, and exploring the relations among discourse, ideology and power. Taking CDA as an instrument and introducing it into translation studies, the present thesis applies Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to the analysis of GWRs translation, focusing on exploring the manipulation of ideology over the C-E translation of GWRs. In the first step, the thesis makes a contrast between the Chinese version and English version of the GWRs; describing the variations of the translated version in“Classification”, “Modality”, and “Transformation”, and accounting for the influence of ideology upon the interpretation and reproduction of GWRs. In the second step, the thesis proposes a series of approaches for the C-E translation of GWRs in accordance with the impact of ideology upon translation, and emphasizes the subjective importance of the translator during the process of translation from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.The present research indicates that, under the impact of ideology, translator has to make decision on choosing appropriate linguistic forms in translating the GWRs, and that the translator has to focus much attention on ideology in which the GWRs were produced, and to reproduce the ideological characteristics in the translated version of the GWRs.