A Report On The Translation Of Report On The Work Of Rizhao Municipal Government (2015)

With the ever-increasing improvement of national comprehensive power and external communication, China is now involved in international cooperation in a more active manner.Meanwhile, local governments in China attach more importance to international exchanges and cooperation, and strengthen foreign-oriented publicity for improving international image and influence. The translation of local government work reports is regarded as an important way for local governments to carry out foreign-oriented publicity. In this thesis, the writer selects Report on the Work of Rizhao Municipal Government(2015) as the content to be translated and analyzed.As one of the important western translation theories, Skopostheorie mainly includes three rules, Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. According to Skopostheorie, translation is viewed as a purposeful activity. For the purpose of foreign-oriented publicity, the translator should abandon the original form and add necessary information to facilitate the understanding of target receivers by following the three rules. Three principles have been concluded in light of Skopostheorie. The first principle is that the choice of translation strategies is determined by the purpose of foreign-oriented publicity for translating local government work reports. The second one is that the language and culture of target receivers should be taken into account for producing a meaningful and intelligible translation version. The third one is that the political features of local government work reports should be properly maintained, so as to show the seriousness and formality of political texts.This thesis mainly consists of five parts. Part One is the introduction of this report. Part Two is the task description. Part Three describes the process of the translation. Part Four provides an explicit description about the case analysis in terms of three rules of Skopostheorie. Part Five is the conclusion of translation approaches and principles related to political texts. Guided by Skopostheorie, the thesis attempts to elucidate effective translation approaches and strategies for translating local government work reports and other similar political documents from a new perspective. Although there are still some defects and deficiencies in the study, due to the writer’s limited knowledge about both political documents and Skopostheorie, it may shed light to the research on translation of local government work reports and make scholars attach more attention to the topic in the future.