A Lexical Account Of C-E Translation Of GWR

The annual Government Work Report (GWR for short), which covers politics, economy and people's life, summarizes the government work in the previous year, and makes overall arrangements for the work to be done in the next year. GWR is an important and authoritative source for the international community to understand the situations in China; therefore, the translation of GWR into a foreign language is of vital importance.Many of the studies of the English version of GWR (EGWR for short) use qualitative approach, but most of them focus on translations of idiomatic expressions or a certain translation theory can be applicable to the translation of GWR. However, those studies only choose very limited aspects of its language use. As a result, it's difficult to get an overall view of the features characterizing EGWR. The present study compares EGWR with American States of the Union (SU for short), whose function is similar to GWR. The author attempts to evaluate the lexical features of EGWR and the underlying reasons. The author uses corpus-based approach to do the study. The texts chosen for study are GWR (2010, by Wen Jiabao), and SU (2010, by Obama). The comparison made so far shows EGWR is more formal in style, which can be seen in the lower TTR (indicates less lexical variety), longer sentences, bigger words and more low frequency words (word lists 11 to 14), more normalizations and compound words than the SU. Based on these factors, we can say EGWR uses more restricted vocabularies. So when translates GWR, basically the translator should maintain the meaning of the original text, and he also should follow the principle of terseness for the sake of ease in reading on the part of native speakers. To arrive at that goal, EGWR should use more postpositive attributives to modify nouns; use different words and expressions to express the same meaning in order to improve the diversity of wording; paying attention to the usage of functional words, etc. All these ways can avoid too formal wording and reduce the usage of normalization to improve the readability of EGWR.In addition, the EGWR is annotated manually (translation techniques), and the use-related information in the texts is retrieved by corpus tools. The study finds that when translating GWR, the major techniques used at lexical level are as follows:addition, omission, change of wording. The translation techniques are subdivided into addition of subject, addition of explanation, addition of explicit words, omission of category nouns, omission of tautologies, considering the grammatical factors, the pragmatic factors, the pursuit of equivalence, and precision of wording. The same word may be treated differently or two nearly the same phrases can use totally different translation techniques. For example, a word can be either category noun or content word. When it is a category noun, it worked as tags (having no lexical meaning) and should be omitted in translation; but when it is a contend word, it should not be omitted in translation. Take the word "工作" for example, if it is attached to nouns such as"地震检测,计划生育"(the nouns they it is attached are concrete pieces of work), it is in fact a category noun. In another case,"把工作重点放到转变经济发展方式","工作"here is a content word. However,"加快推进汶川地震灾后恢复重建"wastranslated into we accelerated the post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery and reconstruction work. We can find that the category noun "工作" that does not exist in the original is added to the translated sentence. It is difficult to work our accurately a rule for the use of a translation technique. A skilled translator will consider the contextual factors before he used the translation technique.