An Adaptation Approach To The C-E Translation Of Official Document

Official document has its special functions and linguistic features and it is with abundant cultural, political and social elements. As a result, translation of official document should not only conform to the general principles of translation but also stick to its own rules, criteria and approaches so that it can achieve its functional purpose.After observing major features of Chinese and English official document, this research firstly expounded the rationality and necessity of conducting research on official documents translation from the perspective of adaptation theory. This theory holds that language use consists of the continuous linguistic choice-making and explains the reason why people can make continuous linguistic choices when using language is that language has three properties: variability, negotiability and adaptability. Four angles should be investigated pragmatically in approaching a linguistic phenomenon: contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, and the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of adaptation process.As a special form of language phenomenon, translation is a process of continuous making of linguistic choices in nature and also a process of making adaptation with regard to context and linguistic structure in a dynamic way. In this study it is also found out that the criteria for a successful translation is the principle of cognitive consonance which means the cognitive consistency that the translator's utterances produce in the target receptors when they process and appreciate the author's intentions. This thesis holds that in interpreting process of the informative and communicative information intended by the original author and then in the translation-producing process, the translator also has to reckon with the different structural objects in official document translation to satisfy the cognitive consonance of the target receptors.Therefore, with the principle of cognitive consonance, this thesis studied official document translation from the perspectives of contextual correlates and communicative correlates. Specifically, among the contextual correlates, the social and cultural factors, the mental workings, cognitive mechanism, the translator's intentions, the needs for objective and authoritative information, the aesthetic expectations and acceptability of the target receptors are prominent in their influence upon the translator's linguistic choice-making. The linguistic contextual correlates including intertexuality, contextual cohesion, sequencing, and style play a very important role in determining the translators' linguistic choices in the official document translation. At the lexical level, the knowledge on formality of the official document language including normalization, archaic words and technical terms will help the translators establish their contextual assumption about the official document language. Also the knowledge on the features of the redundancy, fuzziness and ambiguity in official document language can help the translators make linguistic adaptations to satisfy the target receptors' need, aesthetic expectation and acceptability. At the syntactic level, long complicated sentences, parallel structures and idiomatic sentences such as attributive sentences and "shall" are beneficial to them in that the knowledge can help them reproduce an official document translation easily acceptable to the target receptors. It must be pointed out that most of the features observed in the study are generally shared by both English official document and Chinese official document while the features peculiar to the English or the Chinese are singled out for elaborate research such as English attributive sentences and "shall".Within the framework of adaptation theory, Verschueren's viewpoints on the dynamics of the translating process are enriched and tentatively complemented in three aspects. First, the study tried to explore into the psychological motivations behind the translator's linguistic choices and its relationship with the principle of cognitive consonance. Second, the study examined how the translator deals with cultural defaults and how he makes linguistic choices to cater to the political, ideological, and aesthetic aspects dominant in the target cognitive environment. Third, the study attempted to find out the main features of the official document translation and the relationship between them and the translator's linguistic adaptations in translation.Finally this thesis made a tentative conclusion that official document translation is a dynamic process of making adaptation with regard to linguistic structure and communicative context at various level of salience so as to achieve the target receptors' cognitive consonance.