Recontextualization And National Image Construction In External Publicity Translation

As socialism with Chinese characteristics enters a new era and people’s living standards continue to improve,poverty eradication has become the primary task of the Communist Party of China in leading the people to achieve socialist modernization and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.China has made remarkable achievements in poverty eradication,not only helping thousands of families get out of the mountains,but also formulating a series of policies to prevent poor households from returning to poverty.And with the development of information technology,documentary,as a window for the world to understand China and a new-age medium for publicity,carries a large amount of vivid multi-modal information,which can graphically show the majestic power of Chinese poverty eradication efforts to the world,thus shaping the positive national image of China.Since the audiences of anti-poverty documentaries are different at home and abroad,the publication and distribution of documentaries inevitably involve the process of translation and recontextualization.This requires not only translating the source language into the target language,but also dismantling the source context,acquiring some of the contextual elements,updating and reorganizing them to construct a new context.During this time,all elements in the source language need to be adapted and transformed through deletion,addition,substitution,and rearrangement,etc.so that the source context culture can be fully delivered to the target context audiences and meet the needs of them.In this thesis,a group of 30 bilingual documentaries on poverty eradication is selected for analysis,and an analytical framework involving the recontextualization of national image is constructed.The framework is guided by the relationship between text and context in the pedagogical discourse reconstruction model proposed by Bernstein and van Leeuwen’s recontextualization model of social practice.It attempts to explore the operational mechanism of recontextualization involved in the translation of documentaries on poverty eradication in the process of constructing Chinese national image.Specifically,this thesis addresses the following three research questions: 1.What recontextualization strategies are used in the translation of documentaries on poverty eradication? 2.Why can the principles formed by the recontextualization strategies be used to guide the translation of the documentary on the construction of the national image of China? 3.How can recontextualization strategies and principles be used to guide the translation of documentaries on poverty eradication? It is hoped that this thesis can provide a new perspective for the translation of documentaries in the construction of Chinese national image.Research shows that in the process of constructing Chinese national image in anti-poverty documentaries,translation must go through the following process of recontextualization.Firstly,for the participants,the anti-poverty documentary needs to sort out the differences between domestic and foreign contextual elements,such as linguistic and cultural differences and the differences between audience requirements.Secondly,in its specific communication activities,a documentary on poverty eradication must be recontextualized,and in this process,it needs to go through the process of deletion,addition,substitution,and rearrangement to make the translation more suitable to the new context in terms of content and form,so as to truly deepen western audiences’ cognition of Chinese poverty eradication,and build up in their minds the image of China as a country that serves the people,exemplifies modern governance capacity,and is steadfast on the road of poverty eradication.In the process of translating with recontextualization strategies,the documentary on poverty eradication has formed its own principles of recontextualization,namely: dutiful expression,flexible innovation,dynamic equivalence,graphic transmission,image construction and prompt feedback.These six principles lead the content of the documentary to be presented in a way that is more suitable for the target context,so that the translation is more consistent with the original text in terms of both cultural content and expression,thus achieving its effects in both form and spirit.The translation should be highly readable to western audiences,so that it can effectively achieve the purpose of communication,tell the Chinese story in a more expressive way and create a real,three-dimensional and comprehensive image of poverty eradication career in China.At the same time,this thesis selects a series of documentaries on poverty eradication for translation practice,incorporating the strategies and principles of recontextualization into the translation process in order to achieve translation with the best effect in expression.This will create a positive national image of China in the minds of foreign viewers and promote the successful practice of poverty eradication in China to the world.