On The Hybridity Of The Chinese-English Translation Of Political Texts

Chinese political texts play a very important role in publicizing Chinese government's standpoints on political, economic, social and diplomatic affairs. Political speeches rendered by leaders of the country and the Party are representative cases of the type. Therefore, the translation of Chinese political texts is of great significance. However, their translations are often criticized from the angle of Chinese English, English with Chinese characteristics on vocabulary, syntax and the way in which the thoughts are shaped into words. Many scholars studying the translation of Chinese political texts focus on how to avoid Chinese English and to produce the idiomatic target language. In this thesis, the author does it from an entirely different perspective. She holds that the translation of Chinese political texts inevitably bears a marked brand of the source text and presents a feature of hybridity with fidelity as its general translation principle because Chinese political texts are usually marked with obvious imprints of unique culture and language.Hybridity, a concept used in multiple disciplines, is a hot topic in translation studies nowadays. Generally speaking, a hybrid refers to a new product originating from two different species. This product embodies new features different from its"parents"besides inheriting some characteristics from them. In translation studies, the concept of hybridity is used to describe the hybrid property of the translated text in which foreign and accessible cultural and linguistic components to the target reader are mixed. The hybridity of translated texts makes them becoming a unique type of texts distinct from those originally produced in the target language and culture. As for translation methods, a hybrid translation is the product resulting from employing translation methods of foreignization and domestication within the same translated text.It can be said that translations are all hybrids because we can always find foreignness in them. To justify this statement, this thesis studies a new case that scholars have not touched upon in the former studies of the hybridity of translation. It is the hybridity of the Chinese-English translation of political texts, to be exact, the English translation of the Report to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (the Report). The author attempts to find out the expressions of the hybridity of the translated Report and analyze the reasons why so much foreignness is retained in the translated Report, which causes its hybridity, and the functions such a hybrid translation can fulfill. By doing these analyses, it is hoped to show that the hybridity of the translated Report is necessary and inevitable.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction. It briefs the motivation and objectives of the present study, the delimitations of some terms in this thesis, the case chosen for discussion, research methods and organization of the whole thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. It reviews previous studies on the translation of political texts done by western and domestic scholars from different perspectives, namely the linguistics-oriented approach, the function-oriented approach, the sociocognitive theory of genre, the fidelity-oriented principle, the stylistics-oriented approach and the equivalence translation theory.Chapter Three takes the study of hybridity and translation as a theoretical background. After giving a brief introduction to the origin of the word"hybrid"and some studies in non-translation fields done by M. M. Bakhtin and Homi K. Bhabha, the author focuses on the studies of the hybridity of translation and summaries a theoretical framework including the definition, the expressions, the reasons and the functions of hybrid texts in terms of the studies done by former scholars to direct the analysis of this thesis. This is because the hybridity of translation is a new subject in translation studies and therefore a systematic theoretical framework has not been established yet.Chapter Four analyzes the expressions of the hybridity of the English translation of the Report to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in detail. It discusses foreign and accessible components to the target reader in the translated Report respectively. The author holds that foreignness and accessibility can be found at the levels of both culture and language. At the cultural level, foreignness lies in a large number of foreignized terms with Chinese Characteristics, including addressing terms, terms about the polity, the organization of the ruling Party, the ideological guidelines of the Party and policies in the concrete social spheres and historically political terms. At the linguistic level, some ordinary words, phrases, sentences and textual structures also show Chinese characteristics. The accessible elements are presented at the level of culture only to some extent. Most of them mainly stay on the level of language. And then, the author gives rough statistics of expressions with foreignness in the translated Report to show that they take up a relatively large proportion, which causes the translated Report highly hybrid.Chapter Five mainly analyses the reasons and functions of such a hybrid translated Report on the foundation of the discussions in the previous chapter. In this chapter, arguments of Newmark's correlative translation, some stylistic knowledge and some ideas of the manipulation schools in translation studies are used to serve the explanations about four main factors causing so much foreignness retained in the translated Report. They are the important statue of the source text in the source language and culture, the stylistic features of the source text, the ideological factors and the factor of the target reader. The functions of the hybrid translated Report are discussed according to the concrete Chinese situations. The author argues that the hybrid translated Report can not only fulfill the need of publicizing Chinese political and social culture, but also can enrich English expressions. Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the bulks of this thesis.Chapter Six is the conclusion of this thesis. Firstly, it reaffirms the inevitability of the hybridity of culture and translation and restates the significance of the present study. Cultural hybridity is inevitable because of continuous exchanges between different cultures. Translation, the product of cultural communications, is an act of hybridization. Therefore, translations will present the characteristic of hybridity too. The study of the hybridity of translation helps to discover the nature of translation and provides a new angle to reconsider the debates over the translation methods of domestication and foreignization. And then, it summaries the major findings of this thesis and aspects needed to do further researches.