A Study On The Translation Style Of The 19^th National Congress Report From The Descriptive Perspective

The 19^th report is a political report delivered by president Xi Jinping on behalf of the 18 thCPC central committee at the 19^thnational congress of the Communist Party of China.It covers all aspects of the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics,making it an authoritative source for foreign readers to understand China's political,economic and cultural conditions.Hence,its English translation level has a direct bearing on China's external publicity work,international image,even national interests.Gathering the wisdom of top experts in the field of translation,the English rendition of the report is of high quality,because the translation work not only involves Chinese experts,but also invites an English expert to participate in translation and verification work in advance.Consequently,it achieves excellent international communication effects and is worth learning by translation researchers,workers and learners.Based on Holmes' s descriptive translation theory as the theoretical guidance,this study takes the English version and Chinese version of the 19^threport published on the official website as the corpus with the 2018 State of the Union address of US as the reference corpus to explore the translation style of the English translation of the19^threport.In addition,the thesis gives explanations to the formation of the style in terms of society,history,culture and ideology.This thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative research methods.Quantitatively,three small corpora from official websites are built here to describe and compare the linguistic features of the 19^th report at three levels,the lexical,syntactic and textual level with corpus tools and to find out the implicit translation style of linguistic features through comprehensive data analysis.Qualitatively,with the help of the theoretical tools of descriptive translation studies and the analysis results of the last part,the translation strategies as the translation style of non-linguistic features adopted in the translation of the 19^threport is under study.Besides,the main factors influencing the formation of linguistic translation style and the selection of translation strategies is expounded from the cultural,social and otheraspects.The results show that the English version 19^th report has narrower range of vocabulary,which is less various and flexible,uses more longer solid words with complicated and profound nature,and less function words;it has many long and varied sentences,and complicated sentence patterns;the text reading is difficult.The translation style of the English rendition of the 19^th report is more formal.In terms of translation strategies,foreignization and domestication strategies are in flexible use in the English translation of the 19^th report.The literal method is mainly applied in translations of proper nouns or culture-loaded words;the free translation method in translating four-character idioms,phrased and parallel structures.Besides,cultural and social differences are discussed as factors that have an impact on its translation style and translation strategy selection.The quantitative data analysis and qualitative investigation for the main research object,the translation text of the report opens up a more scientific and objective research perspective for the study of English translation of the 19^th report,provides a reference for the export of government work reports in English translation,and broadens the way of thinking of translation research.Meanwhile,it is helpful to strengthen the relationship between theory and practice,and to enhance the explanatory power and application of the descriptive theory.