The Application Of Critical Discourse Analysis In Reported Discourse Translation

This dissertation is a report on the Chinese-English translation project of A History of China-U.S.Relation,1911-1949.The book is a historical and social science book published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House,reflecting the historical disputes between China and the United States and maintaining high value in translating and introducing to the rest of the world.Its English version is projected to be issued internationally by Springer Company in June 2021.The cases selected and discussed in this report are mainly from the trial translation excerpt used for the grant application of Chinese Academic Translation Project of National Social Science Fund of China.By reading the source text,the Author found that this book is full of reported discourse,most of which are reported by Tao Wenzhao,the book author based on the English citations.One thing deserves mentioning is that some misrepresentations and asymmetric information were verified by means of comparing the ST and citations.In view of the high intertextuality the source text owns and high similarity between ST and news reports in terms of their narrative and reporting styles,the Author first conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of all the reported discourse.Then he sorted all the reported discourse in ST into two categories,objectively reported discourse and non-objectively reported discourse.The preliminary researches show that the book author uses more direct authoritative sources,prefers indirect quotations,and the verbs used are mostly performatives.Overall speaking,most of reported discourse in the source text were objectively reported,yet the number of non-objectively reported discourse is not too small.Based on CDA,the author classified the reported discourses in the source text and chose different translation methods.With regard to the objectively reported discourse translation,the Author/Translator tried his best to convey the information under the help of citations and made some necessary revisions to improve the quality of the target language.For the Non-Objectively reported discourse,he first detected the author’s slight revisions in the subject,content,and reporting verbs that make the reported sentences lack objectivity,then translated ST author’s information accurately and objectively.In this process,he can only be faithful to the source text and the book author instead of the cited text.This translation practice has proved that in translating non-literary social sciences texts with abundant reported discourse,Critical Discourse Analysis can be helpful to the translator in many aspects.What is more,in his Translation process,the translator has multiple identities as a translator,a reporter,and a back-translator.Finally,in this translation process,some dynamic relationships exist among the cited text,the source text and the target text.