C-E Translation Of Parallelism In A Report On The Work Of The Government Of Hunan Province(2015)

The Report on the work of the government belongs to the political essay and its English version plays an important role in China’s exchanges with the outside world, through which people all over the world can understand China’s political, economic and cultural policies. From the perspective of style in the report on the work of the government, we find the use of parallelism is an obvious characteristic, but the translating of parallelism is difficult to handle. It’s possible for translators to make parallelism equivalently transplanted in the target language because of the similarity in structure and function in Chinese language and English language, whereas the distinction and difference between two languages bring a lot of difficulties in translation.In the part of translation review, the translator first identifies the concept of parallelism since it’s still a controversial concept in Chinese language. In terms of definition, the translator uses the concept of "Two Similar Items", i.e. a figure of speech that uses similar structures in two or more related words, phrases, or clauses to express related ideas. Firstly, the translator analyses parallelism in the text and divides them into three categories, among which the explicit parallelism and the implicit parallelism is the main category. Secondly, the translator studies three main functions of parallelism, on the basis of which the translator puts forward three translation principles: the principle of faithfulness, the principle of correctness and the principle of coherence. Finally, the translator summarizes five pieces of translating techniques adopted in this materialThe author has some findings in the translation of parallelism in this text. When the explicit parallelism appears in the form of a simple sentence, a complex sentence and sentence groups, literal translation method can be used to achieve its rhetorical function. The implicit parallelism should be considered from logic-semantic relations within parallel items. If there is a coordinating relationship among them, literal translation method can be adopted, but if not, we should give up the pursuit of parallelism in the target language and adopt free translation in order to effectively achieve its informative function. For explicit parallelism, omission and substitution are two commonly-used techniques to translate the repeated phenomenon in form of morphemes, words, phrases to perform the cohesive function among them. For implicit parallelism, we often use addition, division and reconstruction to reproduce the semantic cohesion among parallel items, making a text clearer and more coherent with a reasonable logic.