A Report On The Translation Of2012Reports On Government Work Of Four Municipalities

The annual report on government work reviews the past achievements and putsforward overall arrangements, covering a wide range of issues, namely, politics,economy, culture and people’s life. The four municipalities in China play a veryimportant role in the development of China’s politics, economy and culture. As aresult, their English versions are the most authoritative official information for theworld to know the development and politics of the cities. Meanwhile, the report onthe government work belongs to one kind of government documents. Currently, thegovernment document is among one of the largest translation business areas, thusrelated terms summarized from the translation project, a profound text analysis donebefore translation and an analysis on practical problems which occurs during thetranslation are valuable for translators. Some authors have made some analysis andresearch with wide range and rich theories on government work report from differentaspects, however, most of which focused on theoretical analysis and separated frompractice. Based on the former research, this report will combine theory with practiceto provide supplement to the existing research.This translation report chooses2012reports on government work of fourmunicipalities as the object of study, and selects the parts related to people’swellbeing in each report thereby narrows the range of study so as to avoid that theresearch covers a wide range while there is no focus in it. During the preparatoryphase before translation, the author collects several reports on government workissued by the prime minister in recent years, then makes a careful study on the partsrelated to people’s wellbeing to summarize the frequently used words, phrases andsentence patterns so as to provide some reference for the modification andimprovement of the translated version. In this translation project, guided by Nord’stext analysis theory and text type theory of functionalist school, it analyzesintratextual and extratextual factors affecting the translators during the translation,and proposes that translators should maintain semantic equivalence between Englishversion and source text and deliver same information in target text for thecharacteristics of the report on government work as a kind of informative text; it sums up stylistic features and language features of the report on government work toimprove the quality of translation text and facilitate in following linguistic customsof the target language. Furthermore, it makes in-depth analysis on typical translationproblems confronted with in the course of translation, such as how to translatefrequently used abbreviations, abstract nouns and macro words together with how tohandle with the logical relationships in sentences and sentence groups, then discussesappropriate translation skills and methods like annotated translation, omissiontranslation, rational collocation and analysis of logical relationships in sentences andsentence groups. Finally, it proposes the qualities a translator should possess intranslation.