Government Website Translation From The Perspective Of Multimodality

Government website translation is one of the important channels for foreign countries to understand China’s national conditions and current affairs.It is a topic of constant discussion in academic circles.As one of the six working languages of the United Nations,English has the widest users in international affairs.Therefore,in China,government website translation mainly refers to the English translation of government websites.The target audience of the English version website comes from English speaking countries.Because of the cultural differences between Chinese and foreign readers,the English version of government websites displays different characteristics from the Chinese one.At present,the domestic researches on the government website translation mainly focus on the linguistic level,and there are few studies on the visual changes.This paper takes the English version of the official websites of Shanghai government as the research object,and the original Chinese versions as a comparison reference,and explores the different features both visually and linguistically from the perspective of multimodality,in order to try to provide a reference for improving the government website translation practice in the future.From the visual aspect,according to the interactive meaning and composition meaning based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,it is found that the English version of Shanghai Municipal People’s Government website shows significant changes,compared with the original Chinese version,in terms of page layout,colour and image.The webpage of the English version is longer but the layout is more concise than that of the Chinese version.In addition,it highlights the pictures’interactive function with readers.In terms of colour,although the main colour of the original website is red,the coverage area of red is obviously decreased,which shows that the translator,on the basis of maintaining the overall colour impression of the original website,considers the overall atmosphere of the website and the negative associative meaning by different audiences for the same colour,thus achieving the ideal communication purpose.Adding pictures is the most significant visual change in the English version.Large area of picture coverage not only attracts readers’ interest while reading,but also gives readers more power,so as to improve readers’ participationOn the linguistic level,four aspects of recontextualization by van Leeuwen are adopted to analyse the English versions of news reports with the same topic on the websites of Shanghai Municipal People’s government and the official websites of the Information Office of the Shanghai Municipal People’s government from the perspectives of rearrangement,substitution,addition and deletion.It is found that addition often occurs when international communication-related topic involves,while deletion is often adopted when translating the domestic news;rearrangement is mainly reflected in the paragraph reorganization,and then followed by the content sequence reorganization;substitution often makes the original information fuzzy or accurate.The four translation strategies above also show that the audience’s reading demands should be taken into consideration in news translation on government websites,so as to enhance the interactive function between the website and readers and achieve the ideal purpose of news translationOn the basis of multimodal theory,this thesis analyses the visual and linguistic features of the English version of Shanghai municipal government websites.The research not only enriches the relevant theories of multimodality,but also has practical significance,which provides a certain reference value for better translation of the government websites.