A Report On The Chinese-english Translation Of Government Documents From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Government work report is a form of official government documents that covers a range of aspects including politics,economy,culture,education,science and technology and people’s livelihood.Government work report at all levels is one of the authoritative channels through which the international communities understand China’s national conditions and local conditions,so the significance of their translation is self-evident.From the perspective of functionalist Skopos Theory,this thesis studied the corpus of the excerpts of Jilin Provincial Government Work Report(2020)and focused on probing into the linguistic features and translation methods of Chinese local government documents so as to offer reference to the translation of political texts and help overseas people to understand the political,economic,cultural and social development of Jilin Province.The main body of this thesis includes 5 parts: description of the translation task,analysis of the source text,theoretical basis and literature review,overview of the translation process and case analysis.According to the stylistic characteristics of the source text,this thesis,based on the functionalist Skopos Theory and its rules of skopos,coherence and fidelity,studied the translation methods at lexical and syntactic levels in the translation practice of government documents.At the lexical level,the translation methods of culture-specific words,abbreviated words and metaphorical words and expressions were studied by means of free translation,literal translation with annotation and explanation.At the syntactic level,an in-depth analysis on how to translate non-subject sentences,long sentences and parallel sentences according to the three rules of Skopos Theory was conducted,and translation methods such as amplification,omission,sentence restructuring and literal translation were employed to effectively solve the translation problems at the syntactic level.Translation of government work report aims at accurately conveying the source language in a way that is easy for readers of the target language to understand.In the process of translation,the skopos rule always occupies the leading position,i.e.,to ensure the accuracy of information transmission,plenty of translation methods such as literal translation,literal translation with annotation and explanation are used to preserve the language style of the source text to the greatest extent.Besides,translation methods such as free translation and sentence restructuring make the target text closer to target language expression,thus ensuring the semantic coherence of the translation.