On The Pragmatic Equivalence In The C-E Translation Of Diplomatic Speeches

Diplomatic speeches play a very important role when political leaders are on their overseas trips.They contain important information about China's national policies and help to improve China's image in the international community.Therefore,the translation of diplomatic speeches plays an irreplaceable role in boosting bilateral cooperation.This thesis,through a case study of the diplomatic speeches made by President Xi Jinping in 2015,explores how to achieve pragmatic equivalence in translating Chinese diplomatic speeches into English.With the development of pragmatics,pragmatic translation attracts increasing attention,which aims at minimizing mistranslation caused by cultural differences and maximizing the equivalence between source texts and target texts.Pragmatic equivalent translation is about achieving pragmatic-linguistic equivalence and socio-pragmatic equivalence.This thesis will explore the pragmatic equivalent translation strategies for the C-E translation of diplomatic speeches from three aspects:words,sentences and textual cohesion.Chinese diplomatic speeches contain a large number of four-character words which most are developed from Chinese classics,making them formal and elegant.These four-character words carry profound cultural implications.When translating these words,instead of pursuing formal equivalence,the translators can adopt the translation methods such as omission and free translation as well as division and combination,to convey the semantic meaning of the source text.Chinese diplomatic speeches also contain many culture-characteristic words and political neologisms.For the translation of these words,free translation and amplification should be adopted to bridge the cultural gap and deal with cultural defaults.As to the translation of sentences,this thesis focuses on the translation of non-subject sentences,parallelism sentences,complex sentences and proverbs.Non-subject sentences are frequently seen in Chinese diplomatic speeches.However,English sentences have typical subject-predicated structures.Hence,the translators need to add either personal subjects or non-personal subjects when translating these sentences.Chinese and English parallelism have different focuses.When translating such sentences,the translators can adopt the method of combination and reconstruction to make parallelism sentences conform to English linguistic norms.The long sentences in Chinese diplomatic speeches are composed of short sentences and are complicated in syntactic structure.The translators can use the method of division to make the sentence structure clear and logic.Proverbs possess rich cultural meanings.When possible,the translators can use literal translation to pass the original messages of Chinese culture or use free translation to reproduce in the target text the cultural connotation of the original.The most important contrast between Chinese and English is hypotaxis and parataxis.To achieve cohesion,the translators can add grammatical devices,like reference and substitution,to make the translation more idiomatic in the target language and achieve coherence.In addition,the translators can add proper logical connectors to transfer the semantic meaning of the source text accurately and reach pragmatic equivalence.The author of this thesis applies pragmatics into translation and discusses how to achieve pragmatic-linguistic equivalence and socio-pragmatic equivalence in the C-E translation of diplomatic speeches,thus providing a new perspective for the translation researches in this field.