An Analysis Of Problems In C-E Translation Of China’s Official Speeches In Business,and Countermeasures

The China’s official speeches in business are those made by leaders of Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China in foreign affairs. And these speeches are the most important and authoritative source. Based on the current study of translation of this text type, this thesis analyzes the typical C-E translation problems in these speeches and put forward corresponding countermeasures. Nine speeches from late2011to2012, selected from the website of Ministry of Commerce are analyzed under the guidance of Functionalist theory with the results to find out such four typical translation problems in speeches as:(1) non-equivalence in information focus;(2) obscurity of logic semantic relations;(3) word redundancy;(4) inconsistency of translated business terms.These problems are due to translators’ lack of business knowledge, unawareness of differences between Chinese and Western cultural thinking patterns. In order to make the target text and the source text equivalent in line with the Functionalist theory, this thesis proposes such countermeasures against these problems as:(1) to make information focus logic equivalence;(2) to make implicit logic semantic relations explicit;(3) to delete or change unnecessary words;(4) to keep translated business terms consistent.By analyzing C-E translation of China’s official speeches in business, this thesis may help you to have a better understanding of problems in speech translations, to improve quality and acceptability of target texts so as to fully convey Chinese government’s economic policies.