On Translation Strategies And Communication Effect Of Political Terms From The Perspective Of National Image

With the further improvement of China's comprehensive national strength and international influence,national image,as an important part of international competition,has been raised to a strategic level.China's politics has always been a focus of the outside world.The government clarifies various policies through political documents and speeches,expresses political standpoints and views,and displays country's images of all sides.Chinese political terms are concepts and expressions with specific forms,meanings and Chinese characteristics formed in the political documents of central committee or activities of the Party and government in dealing with internal affairs and diplomacy.Their translation shoulders an important mission to reflect China's national conditions and social development,promote international exchanges and cooperation,and disseminate a good image of the country.Due to the uniqueness of political terms,translation quality not only affects the accurate expression and external dissemination of the connotation of Chinese viewpoints,readers' acceptance and identification,but also relates to the construction and communication of a positive national image.At present,researches of the translation of political terms in China mostly study translation problems and strategies based on various translation theories with case study.This thesis tries to analyze it from the perspective of national image communication according to national image theory as well as Lasswell's Communication theory.It stresses the vital role of national image and audience in international communication.It insists that the audience will actively accept images similar to their original cognition based on their cultural background and language habits.The communication of national image mainly explores the impression of a country's political elite and the public on other countries,including five elements: communicator,content,media,audience and communication effect,and translation is essentially a communication activity,including translator,source text,translated text,reader and audiences' acceptance.Specifically speaking,the communicator of the translation activities of political terms is the subject of translation,and communication content is translation content achieved throughtranslation strategies in which audience and national image are important influencing factors.Communication effect is the ultimate destination of translation and national image.The combination of these two theories can provide an interdisciplinary and practical theoretical perspective for the study of political terms.The translation of political terms,on one hand,is to transmit national policies and concepts;on the other hand,to communicate positive images of the country.The thesis chooses 198 items of political terms as the research subject,respectively extracted from the 17 topics of Xi Jinping,The Governance of China,covering a wide range of politics,economics,culture,ecology,society,national defense and diplomacy.With qualitative and quantitative research,this paper mainly explores the translation subject,translation strategies and communication effect of political terms from the perspective of national image communication.Firstly,it will analyze the characteristics of translation subject according to its operational mode in terms of activity initiation,content selection and translator allocation.Secondly,the study of communication content is mainly based on translation content and translation strategies which mainly analyze the general tendency of translation based on national image,focusing on either “foreignization and political equivalence”,or “reader-orientation and communicative function”.The thesis lists a table to quantitatively study the proportion of different translation methods of selected terms under different translation strategies,and qualitatively explore the reasons for the choice of methods and the relationship with national image;thirdly,changes of audience's attitudes towards Chinese politics in cognitive and emotional attitudes are discussed through evaluations of political elites as well as relevant news reports and the frequency of occurence in foreign newspaper corpus,and also influence of its communication effect on the national image.It is found that the selection of political terms,the allocation of translators and the presentation of translated texts are to a great extent consistent with the translation characteristics of national institutional translation.The translation strategies tend to be“self-centered” or “foreignization-prior”,including transliteration,literal translation and creative translation,in which literal translation accounts for the largest proportion which reflects the active dissemination of China's voice and the construction of China's political discourse system.And at the same time,in order to be closer to the needs of foreign audiences and improve the communication effect,flexible methods like addition,omission,interpretive translation and annotations are also employed.But whatever translation strategy,the purpose is to better tell Chinese stories and construct a positive image of the country.Besides,the attitude of overseas media towards Chinese politics has changed from negative to neutral,and the communication effect of the translation of political terms that related to major national policies or ideas has gradually been accepted by overseas audiences,but the communication effects of the majority still need to be strengthened.And communication approaches should be innovated to better disseminate the image of contemporary China.In short,exploring the institutional translation,translation strategies and communication effects of political terms from the perspective of national image communication can not only accurately convey China's concepts of governing the country,domestic and foreign policies,but also provide reference for future political discourse translation and the construction of China's political discourse system,and even be conductive in disseminating positive images of China in the new era.