Strategies For Chinese To English Translation Of Abstract Nouns With Affixes In Political Texts

Based on Xi Jinping:The Governance of China Ⅲ&Ⅳ,the thesis aims at analyzing the translation of abstract nouns with affixes from Chinese to English.The book is an authoritative work demonstrating the concepts and strategies of governing and providing insightful answers to significant problems the Party and the government have encountered.Abstract nouns with affixes,which are of high distinctiveness in Chinese,are frequently used in political texts.Under most circumstances,such affixes make sense only when being combined with notional nouns.Concerning that abstract nouns are expressions with Chinese characteristics,certain strategies have to be adopted while translating.Abstract nouns are highly context-dependent and can be conceptualized differently within different contexts.The study focuses on the abstract nouns with four characters as affixes,namely "xíng","huà",“lì",and "xìng",aiming at summarizing strategies of translating abstract nouns in political texts.Communicative translation proposed by Newmark is a receptor-oriented principle which focuses on the acceptability and understandability of the readership.Different from semantic translation emphasizing formal consistency while rendering the exact contextual meaning,communicative translation should take target readers’ cultural backgrounds and expression habits into consideration to realize the communicative effects.Based on the quantitative analysis,the proportions of adopting the strategy of semantic equivalence,semantic interpretation and semantic substitution are 69.66%,19.92%and 10.42%respectively in translating abstract nouns in political texts.Major findings of the thesis come down to two points:1)the strategy of word contextualization is frequently adopted for translating abstract nouns with the four characters as affixes,the aim of which is to realize the communicative effects;2)the translation of abstract nouns with affixes in political texts chiefly follows the principle of communicative translation proposed by Newmark.Through the analysis of translation,strategies are summarized for translating abstract nouns in political texts to help translators produce the most appropriate translation and English readers better understand the connotation of Chinese political texts,thus contributing to the cultural communication.