On The English Translation Of Zhongguo Meng

The past year has witnessed the rise of Zhongguo Meng as an integral constituent of the Chinese political discourse.However,along with its exportation,the English translational practice is inconsistent.Its major English versions currently available are Chinese?Dream,China Dream and China's Dream,with a descending order of frequency.Overall,previous translation studies on Zhongguo Meng show some limitations.Firstly,there is a lack of depth in the conceptual analysis.They are often bound up by the contemporary standpoint.Secondly,the evaluation of Zhongguo Meng's translation is generally stranded upon the linguistic dimension.In the quest for the socio-cultural originality of Zhongguo Meng,the author of the present thesis adopts a conceptual and comparative perspective.Theoretically,the German conceptual history is pinned down as the framework.What is being after thereof is the evolutionary discontinuity and contestability of Zhongguo Meng through synchronic and diachronic analyses.In the present study,the conceptual history of Zhongguo Meng mainly comes in two ways.Firstly,in the conceptual analysis,there would be a classical and historical interpretation of Zhongguo Meng.It would be traced back to the cultural origins along the flow of history in the Chinese context.Secondly,the comparative analysis takes Zhongguo Meng's conceptual field and cross-lingual reception into consideration.To start with,Zhongguo Meng is put in juxtaposition with its Western analogues,namely,the American Dream and the European Dream.The study on Zhongguo Meng in the ordinary languages comes after.Two specialized corpora have therein been built up,composed of news articles published in the past year by the Chinese and Western media respectively.The preliminary findings are twofold.Firstly,the historical documentation of Zhongguo Meng,though not exhaustive,yields the conclusion that the political concept is a distinctive historical heritage of philosophical implications.It is identified with the political prospects of both xiaokang and datong.Secondly,it has been found that on some occasions,Zhongguo Meng has run into sheer misinterpretations by the Western media.On the basis of Zhongguo Meng's conceptual history,the ideologically appropriate English translation is finally nailed down as China Dream.The decision-making is preceded with a corpus-based delineation of the semantics of the major existing English candidates.Though the English equivalent China Dream is not truly unarguable as far as Zhongguo Meng's socio-cultural originality is concerned,the familiar tone of Dream suits the convenience of terminological circulation,compared with the abstruse transliteration.However,it is no reason to exclude the prospect of transliteration,for it is on a circuitous route to defend the socio-cultural originality of Zhongguo Meng.In the final analysis,the case of Zhongguo Meng might impinge upon the translation of other political terms.Nevertheless,it remains to be seen whether or not the paradigm of conceptual history could extend to other cases as well.Additionally,the data collection in the present study and the underlying socio-political considerations need a closer inspection.It requires further researches.