"National Administration" Translation Practice Report

By means of reforming budgets,modernizing public action,decentralizing power and other measures,French government has implemented a series of administrative reforms in recent years.What’s more,the anti-corruption work has also yield remarkable achievements.Despite different political systems between China and France,China can still study and explore the valuable experience of France.The third part of The State Administration particularly introduces many administrative reform measures in France,but there’s few Chinese literature that is available for reference at home,let alone translations and works.Therefore,introducing The State Administration into China is of certain value and significance.However,at present,a number of translation practice reports mainly focuse on literary or scientific translations,while few on social science.Regarded as a social science academic work,The State Administration embodies plenty of administrative terms,proper nouns,legal titles,administrative documents,as well as more than one thousand annotations.Besides,there are numerous long sentences and complex structures.The subject of this paper is how to convey to Chinese readers the efficient ideas in this book.The practice of translation requires theoretical guidance.Many people think that translation theories are useless,but in fact,translation practice requires theoretical guidance,which can have instructive,normative,descriptive,explanatory,inspirational and predictive effect on practice.On the basis of the language functions raised by the functional linguist Karl Biihler,Katharina Reiss develops her "text typology" theory.In her theory,she categorizes the texts into three types(informative,expressive,operative)and clarifies the corresponding translation strategies for each of them.For example,The State Administration is a kind of administrative teaching material aiming to convey information,therefore,it is an informative text,which requires the translators to use simple and plain words.This thesis focuses on the specific difficulties in the process of translating The State Administration,such as the translation of the proper nouns,terms,long sentences and annotations,the formal documents and so forth.When the translators select the translated text,they are often motivated by political,aesthetic,cultural communication and commercial reasons,under such circumstances,the translators need to prepare auxiliary tools such as administrative works and documents,special dictionaries and so on to make proper nouns and terms more accurate.What’s more,the obvious mistakes should be avoided during the process of translation and correction.In this thesis,the author summarizes the translation strategies of informative texts based on the text typology theory:1)The translation of proper nouns:transliteration,literal translation,substitution method(using Chinese translation to replace abbreviations),retention method(foreign words are preserved)can be adopted.2)The translation of terms:the concrete meanings need to be defined according to the combination of derivations monosemy,the reasoning of cognate words,as well as scientific context.3)The translation of long sentences:it refers to splitting sentence structure,or reorganizing it based on chronological order and logical order.4)The translation of annotations:annotations with reference sources retain the original works.Explanatory annotations translate messages into Chinese.The annotations combined with explanation and provenance adopt the approach of both retaining and explaining.5)The translation of official documents:words need to be precise,and the translation concise and comprehensive.Domestic documents can be referred.Supported by text type theory and exploring the translation strategies and methods applicable to the writings of social science,this thesis has a certain reference value.