Chinese-English Translation Of Foregrounding Language In External Publicity Texts

The translation material of this report is excerpted from History of Relations between China and Latin American and Caribbean Countries,the Chinese Academic Translation Project which was co-operated by the tutor and the Chinese Social Sciences Press.The book describes the breakthrough and tortuous development of Sino-Latin American relations between 1959 and 1969 showing the surging tide of the history.The source text can be classified as an external publicity text in non-literary text,but there are many literary elements in it.And language with foregrounding characteristic is the most difficult part in this translation.Foregrounding means that writers often break the conventions to make their discourses stand out and occupy the front position during their creative process.Based on the theories of aggregation foregrounding and combination foregrounding raised by Leech and Short,this report classify foregrounding language into two categories correspondingly: first is the translation of language with aggregated foregrounding characteristic and second is the combined foregrounding one.Following Newmark's and Reis' definitions of non-literary translation and literary translation as well as on the basis of the characteristics of external publicity texts,the author applies the translation strategy of combing literal translation with free translation,attempting to apply Liu Miqing's three approaches corresponding,recasting,and decolouring in stylistic markers theory to guide the translation.The author concludes that the smaller the grammatical units in the source language,the less foregrounding features would retained in English translation.If there were conflicts between any of the non-literary and literary elements in this translation,the priority should be given to the main function.In the report,the author realizes that translators of external publicity texts shoulder the essential mission of promoting Chinese culture going out,and they should not only be armed with translation skills,but also should stand in the correct political position.This report is just a sample of this kind of problem-solving intranslation so as to offer a good starting point for other translators in this field.