On The Strategies And Techniques Of Translating Chinese Political Documents Into English

Chinese government documents are an important window to China’s future development. However, the English versions, bound too much by the form, are often full of bureaucratese with typical Chinese characteristics, which causes disapproval and even misunderstandings in foreign readers. By translating the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Domestic Trade Development, I summarized the difficulties of bureaucratese translation in lexical, syntactic and discourse levels before putting forward the strategies and techniques for producing natural and smooth translations. From that, I further discussed the major problems involved in the cross-cultural communication within political field and offered a few tips for translators to follow.