On C-E Translation Of Xi Jinping:The Governance Of China From The Perspective Of German Functionalism

Over the last few decades, China has made remarkable achievements, drawing great attention from the international community. The foreigners are not only interested in China’s culture and history, but also its current development and policy.As the most authoritative and reliable channel for foreigners to get the timely and accurate information about China, political writing plays an increasingly important role in international publicity. China has started a new journey of reform, opening-up and modernization with Xi Jinping as the leader of the China’s new generation of leadership. Representing the CPC central leadership’s concepts and strategies in governing the state, the book Xi Jinping:The Governance of China systematically clarifies the major theoretical and practical issues on the development of the Party and state in the contemporary era. Therefore, it is of vital importance for us to study the Chinese-English translation of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China.The thesis is designed to conduct a case study of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China under the guidance of German Functionalist school of translation theory. First of all, the author makes a literature review on the previous studies on the translation of the political writing and German Functionalist school of translation theory. Then the theoretical framework of the thesis is sketched by sorting out the representative scholars of German Functionalist school of translation study and their main theories.Based on this, the author analyzes the main contents, features, functions and text type of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China in light of Reiss’ s Text Typology and Nord’s Translation-oriented Text Analysis and comes to the conclusion that the Chinese version Xi Jinping:The Governance of China is a hybrid text type with two main functions: informative function and operative function. Meanwhile. After the comparative analysis of extra-textual factors and intratextual features in two versions,the author concludes that the informative function takes precedence over operative function in target text, thus requiring the translator to reduce the expression of operative elements in target text. At last, the author analyzes how the German Functionalist school of translation theory offers guidance in the C-E translationprocess of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China and suggests six appropriate translation methods, namely annotation, omission, addition, substitution, liberal translation and rearrangement. the author expects that this thesis may offer some help to improve the quality of translation of political writing and call for more scholars to devote in the study on translation of political writing, so that China can be better understood by the foreigners and develop with other countries in a favorable international environment.