Translation In International Publicity From A Rhetorical Perspective

With the accelerated globalization of world economy, China’s continuous enhancement in comprehensive national strength as well as the country’s increasingly frequent exchanges with foreign countries, the Chinese people’s desire to raise then-voice on the big world stage becomes stronger and stronger. The Chinese government is promoting the process of internationalization at the national level; at the same time, the relevant units at a variety of social levels are also making continuous efforts in international publicity and self-recommendation. By adopting approaches such as bilingual brochures, international promotion videos and setting up foreign language official websites, these semi-official or non-governmental organizations recommend and introduce the products and services they have to offer. International publicity in general and China’s efforts in this regard in particular have become the subjects for translation-related researches and analyses by quite some domestic and foreign scholars. However, the majority of these scholars have so far carried out their researches from traditional perspectives such as Intercultural Communication, Pragmatics and Skopos Theory, few of them have conducted their studies from the perspective of Rhetoric. This research attempts to apply the theory of Persuasion in Rhetoric to international publicity translation research as its theoretic basis, and thus to undertake a project of cross-disciplinary application research between the studies of international publicity translation and the theory of rhetorical persuasion. To this end, we use translated versions of Fujian Province’s internationally-oriented introductory materials for case analyses, in support of our claim that theory of rhetorical persuasion is of great help to achieving goals of international publicity. The research shows that 1) rhetoric and translation are closely related; 2) theory of rhetorical persuasion could provide new perspectives and shed lights on international publicity-related translation research; 3) the application of insights from theory of rhetorical persuasion is effective in improving the quality of international publicity translation and in facilitating the achievement of expected goals of international publicity. These findings indicate that our research has the potential of widening the scope of research on international publicity-related translation and of providing a significant new point of reference for evaluating internationally-oriented introductory materials. In addition, it would also contribute to China’s current undertakings "to improve national cultural soft power, to make efforts to spread contemporary Chinese sense of value globally".