A Study On C-E Translation Of Political Documents From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the overall growth of China in economic strength and enhanced international presence, foreigners want to know more about China. Meanwhile, China wishes to obtain recognition and respect from other foreign countries. Under such circumstances, promoting China's image becomes an important issue. Political publicity is one approach that the government could adopt. Through political publicity, the government can introduce its state policies or political stand to other countries. Verschueren emphasizes the linguistic choices of language use, especially the three properties of language use. They are variability,negotiability and adaptability. In the Adaptation Theory, there are four angles of investigation including contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes. Moreover, dynamics of adaptability is the core among all. Translation is also a process of making linguistic choices, in which translators turn the source text into the target text.Report on the Work of the Government(hereafter RWG), one of political documents, is a work summary and work plan of the Chinese government which involves the politics,economy, culture, foreign affairs, national defense, education, people's livelihood, etc. As an authoritative political writing, it is the direct source of information for foreigners to know China's actual condition, policies and so on. RWG has its own particular stylistic features.Political terms, formal words, culture-loaded words are abundant in RWG. There are also a large number of non-subject sentences, parallel structures and the usage of long structures. In view of the distinctive stylistic features of RWG, the study adopts the Adaptation Theory as the guidance to study the C-E translation of RWG in 2014 released by Xinhuanet. The analysis will be conducted from four aspects of the Adaptation Theory. They are the contextual correlates of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability and salience of adaptability. By the analysis, this thesis explains the question how translators make appropriate choices to achieve the pragmatic equivalence of translation. At the same time, this thesis proves the significance and necessity of making choices and adaptations in political documents' translation process.The results of the study show that making choices and adaptations should be made on four angles. On aspects of contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability, in C-E translation of RWG in 2014, translators should make proper adaptations to the communicative context, the linguistic context and the linguistic structure which are the contents of adaptation. In detail, translators should make choices and adaptations to the physical, social and mental worlds. Meanwhile, translators should make choices and adaptations to lexical, syntactic and textual level, and make proper choices on the linguisticstructure such as the diction, voices, sentence structures, discourse cohesion and so on. On aspects of dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes, translators should make choices and adaptation dynamically to the temporal dimension, contextual constraints and linguistic structure with the help of high degree of salience. They explain how the adaptability can be achieved in the translation process of political documents. In translation process, both pragmatic functions and translators' consciousness have a marked impact on translators' salience of the dynamically adaptation process.Making a research on translation from the perspective of Adaptation Theory can help language learners to fully comprehend the process of translation. The study sustains the instructive significance of applying the Adaptation Theory to the C-E translation of political documents. It also shows certain value for reference on the further study in this field.