A Study Of Political Publicity Texts Translation Within The Framework Of Critical Discourse Analysis

The translation of political publicity texts published by the Chinese government is a sensitive and complicated component of the C-E translation for global communication. Unlike other types of publicity texts, political publicity texts, with high political sensitivity, directly publicize China’s national policies and ideology, and thus put forward strict requirements on the fidelity and preciseness of their translation.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has provided a new perspective for translation study. With the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as its analytical tool, CDA aims at disclosing how ideology affects a text and what effect a text exerts on ideology. M.A.K.Halliday, the initiator of SFG, believes that human languages have three metafunctions:ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. A translator will have a better understanding of the purpose of communication and the presentation of ideology of a certain text through analyzing its three metafunctions. On the basis of this, a translator can select appropriate linguistic expressions to reproduce the implication, function and intention of the original text in the target language. In recent years, the translation of political publicity texts has become a main focus in the field of CDA study.The present study centers on the white paper issued by the central government of the PRC. The Chinese and English versions of the white paper Diaoyu Dao, an Inherent Territory of China, published on September 25,2012 on the website of the State Council Information Office of the PRC, are selected as the source text and target text of the present study. Within the theoretical framework of CDA, the study conducts a comparative analysis of the original text and its translation from two perspectives:textual analysis and social practice analysis, and the textual analysis is specifically conducted from the following aspects, namely, transitivity, lexical classification, nominalization, modality and thematic structure.The analyses indicate that the ideological meaning hidden behind the literal meaning of the texts is fully reflected in the differences between the original Chinese text and its English version. The two texts, repeatedly claiming that Diaoyu Dao inherently belongs to China, first inform readers of this fact and even make them naturally accept it, and then, different images of China, Japan and the United States, the three major participants of the Diaoyu Dao dispute are portrayed, with China being the just side, Japan as the peace-breaker attempting to violate China’s territorial sovereignty, and the United States as a third party claiming to be impartial but actually taking sides with Japan. In comparison with the original text, obvious differences can be found in the English version in terms of lexical choices, nominalization, modality and thematic choices. With formal and objective language, the English version keeps a distance from Chinese government’s position and actions, and thus objectifies the description of Chinese actions and the comments on the moves of Japan and the United States, making the English version more persuasive.An analysis of the original Chinese version and the translation of government white papers reveals the lexical differences in translation, and an interpretation of those differences on the basis of the relationship between language and ideology, which is beneficial to people’s understanding of the essence of the translation of political publicity texts, proves that CDA and SFG are also applicable to the contrastive study of political texts translation.