Application Of Semantic And Communicative Translation To Chinese Culture-loaded Words In Government Work Reports

With its comprehensive national strength growing, China is playing a more and more decisive part on the global stage. As the most authoritative among all the government work reports in China, the Government Work Report (GWR) is doubtlessly both a platform for many foreign governments, media and individuals to know about China’s national condition, policies and development, and a bridge for the cross-cultural communication between China and other countries. In the first place, through GWR, the Chinese central government intends to state its political attitude and position, and foreign countries and foreigners hope to learn more about China’s polices and situation. As a result, GWR has become an indirect impetus to cross-culture exchanges and cooperation. In the second place, now that English is most widely used in the world, the translation and translation studies of GWR are highly meaningful. In the third place, Culture-loaded Words refer to those words, phrases and expressions, which contain unique or profound culture of a nation and can or cannot find equivalent translation in the target language. The report includes abundant Chinese Culture-loaded Words (CLW), which store unique national properties increasing the difficulty in the translation task. Consequently, there are still insufficient researches on those words and no agreed translation strategies and methods yet. This research is devised to deepen the author’s own understanding of the strategies and techniques that can be used for C-E translation of the CLWs in GWR, and besides, it is intended to provide a new perspective for GWR’s translation studies.The thesis regards literature review, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction as the main research methods. Via the literature review, the author realizes the important guidance of Semantic Translation (ST) and Communicative Translation (CT) in the C-E translation of GWR. In a more detailed manner, this thesis attempts to test the two strategies’applicability to translating the Chinese CLWs in GWR. On the grounds of the GWR’s lexical features, it categorizes the Chinese CLWs in the 2013-2015 GWRs into New Words, Abbreviations and Colloquialisms. After analyzing and synthesizing previous studies, it basically induces four skills to translate Chinese CLWs, that is, literal translation, free translation, transliteration plus literal translation, and annotation. Given this and with the translation cases of the Chinese CLWs in the 2013-2015 GWRs as the materials, it uses ST and CT to explore their specific translation methods, at the end of which course the conclusion is finally arrived at explicitly, namely, literal translation, free translation, transliteration plus literal translation, substitution, ellipsis along with annotation can play an effective role in the C-E translation of those Chinese CLWs. Adopting the deduction method, it will then render around twenty examples to show how these methods function.