A Corpus-Based Study On The Length Of English And French Translations Of The Report At The 19th CPC National Congress

Political texts,as non-literary texts,are mainly for briefing national conditions.policies and explaining the core ideas of the government on major issues.In 201 7,foreign revisers were first introduced into the translations of Report at 19th CPC National Congress(hereinafter referred to as the "Report"),inhencing the quality of communication.The Report has become a hot spot for translation researchers.As a corpus translation study,the research mainly focuses on the length of translation as a feature of translated languages of specific language pairs.The thesis is based on a self-built corpus consisted of two main parts:Chinese-English-French parallel corpus of the "Report",and two comparable corpus containing original English and French political texts.Through statistics,the research tries to understand:1)How the length of translation of political texts differs from general texts;2)the differences of length between English and French version of the'Report" and reasons behind;3)what kind of Chinese language features will result in excess translations.This study combines corpus quantitative statistics with descriptive analysis of data and specific examples,and finds that:1)based on English and French translation of the "Report",translations of political texts are longer than general standard;2)the French translation of the "Report" is longer than the English version.and this difference is beyond the normal length difference between the English and French parallel texts.This difference in the length is mainly caused by language differences and translation strategies,and the latter is the dominant reason.There are mainly five Chinese language features tend to lead to excess translations,including use of allusions,four-character phrases and abbreviations,parallel constructions,specific expression and common sentence structures of Chinese political texts.