Problems And Strategies For Chinese-English Political Translation

Chinese political documents include(1)national policy documents,such as party and government documents and work reports,(2)speeches and writings of the party and state leaders,and(3)political editorials.Chinese-English Political document translation is an important source for other countries to understand China’s political system,policy guidelines,and political positions,etc..From the perspective of Chinese and English linguistic and cultural differences,this paper takes the Report for the Nineteenth Party’s Congress as a case study to explore the difficulties of English translation of Chinese political documents and their translation strategies at lexical,syntactic,discourse,and sociocultural levels.The English version of the Report is of high quality and has several outstanding features:Foreign experts are involved in the early translation process for the first time,who used to polish the finished translation;the translation methods are characterized by flexibility;it has achieved good effects in global communication.Inductive summary of translation of this authoritative political document is conducive to enriching the macro translation theory and increasing the application value of translation theories.This paper finds that due to the huge differences between English and Chinese languages and the formality and comprehensiveness of Chinese political documents,C-E political translation faces many difficulties:(1)At the word and phrase level,the Chinese political documents contain more words and phrases with Chinese characteristics,such as political concepts,abstract words such as "化主","主义" and "性",and rhetorically repeated phrases.Translators must improve the accuracy of choice of lexis,avoid repetition,and annotate words with Chinese characteristics.(2)At the syntactic level,they have more long sentences and loose sentences,mostly subject-less sentences and parallel sentences.Translators should shorten the sentence length,reduce repetition of sentence structures.(3)At the discourse level,their style is characterized by formality and magnificent momentum,and the paragraphs are clear in structure yet too lengthy in word number.In translating them into English,it is necessary to add cohesive words.strengthen the coherence,and control the length of the paragraphs,and appropriately divide the long paragraphs.(4)At the sociocultural level,metaphors and sayings carry unique Chinese culture,and their conceptual meaning and cultural meaning can be similar or different.For the metaphors and sayings whose cultural meaning is different from the Western culture,domestication should be adopted to ensure the accuracy of the meaning.(5)At the political level,some words or phrases may have political implications,which should be properly handled by the translator.The translator should avoid any negative impact on China’s international image and any misinterpretation of its political intentions.