A Study Of Government Work Report Of 2014 And Its Translation Strategies From Textual Rhetorical Perspective

Recently, as China continues to widen opening-up to the outside world and develops its economy in a phenomenally rapid fashion, it has ranked the world’s second largest economy, thus playing an increasingly crucial role in the global arena. Therefore, China badly needs to continuously enhance international publicity and exchanges so as to allow the rest of the world to better know about China, and ultimately contribute to China’s further development in the world. Government Work Report is a yearly report made by Chinese Central Government. Its contents include review and summary of last year’s government work and its arrangement and goals for next year, covering various policies and measures in the fields of economy, politics, culture, diplomacy, social programs and others. Evidently, it becomes the most authoritative and substantial document learning of developing China. Hence, studies of Government Work Report and its translation cannot catch too much attention from the research community.Additionally, investigation finds out few research has been conducted on Government Work Report and its translation strategies from textual rhetorical perspective. Therefore, this paper endeavors to analyze and study Government Work Report of 2014 (short for the Report hereinafter) and its translation strategies from the angle of textual rhetorics. This study has intensively engaged in three major aspects of textual type, textual units and style characteristics of the Report. And its findings show that the Report belongs to political text; its sentences cover chain and parallel connections with implicit logical relationships; its paragraphs either overlap with its sentence groups or include sentence groups; well-arranged sections and wide use of topic sentences highlight contents so as to enable readers to catch information with ease. Its style is characterized by adept integration of strengths from both scientific and literary styles in order to fulfill textual functions of information, publicity and stimulation. Meanwhile, this paper has examined the English version of the Report by means of contrastive study and discovers that sentential logical relationships tend to be explicit; original paragraphs are divided based on sentence groups and integrated styles focus on content in translation with the aim to provide target readers information in a clear and direct fashion. Accordingly, the author summarizes three translation strategies based on textual rhetorics, that is, logic-oriented, clarity-oriented and content-oriented strategies. Hopefully, this study can be conducive to extending textual rhetorical research applied into practical texts and also providing an original research perspective and pattern for exploring similar reports and their English versions.