On Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political Discourse Translation

With the further deepening of globalization, close political exchanges betweencountries have been increasing rapidly. The constant regional disputes put a challenge todiplomatic performances in the international arena, which also led to the growingsignificance of researching into political discourses. UN, as the world’s largestinternational organization composed of193sovereign countries, served as a big platformfor diplomatic games. The UN documents are embodiments of the confrontations betweenparties concerned. However, they were rarely studied for its unique translation features.Within the UN big family, its translations barely spent time in researching due to time andwork pressure. Many researches centering on UN document translation attached greatimportance of translation strategy, translation standard, translation process, translationquality, aiming at reducing budget while still maintaining good translation quality. After all,there exists a lack of descriptive approach to UN document translation study.As for translations studies, systematic functional grammar can be applied to make adetailed analysis on texts, while critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used to analyzethe underneath social reasons for a particular language phenomenon. The combination oftwo theoretical analyzing models can be a pragmatic tool, which however hasn’t gainedenough attention in carrying out a critical discourse analysis in China.In this research, I studied the original Chinese version and two English versions ofExplanation of Vote by Ambassador Li Baodong after Vote on Draft Resolution on SyriaTabled by the United Kingdom from three perspectives, namely, text, discourse practiceand social discourse. Furthermore, I continued to apply Halliday’s systematic functionalgrammar, and tried to identify differences in terms of transitivity, modality andnominalization.The results show that the differences in transitivity, modality and nominalization donot lead to obvious changes in ideology; the social background of a translator has a clearimpact on choosing words, especially nouns relating to a particular international issue. Bychoosing a specific word for his political appeal, the Chinese representative finallyachieved his political goal. The application of CDA enables us to carry out a micro-analysis on both Chinese andEnglish texts, besides, it allows us to go beyond the texts and find out how ideology andsocial contexts have an impact on texts; thus it furthers people’s understanding towardstranslation.