| The current Chinese political discourse is a system that embodies the direction,guidelines and policies of the Party’s development with the fundamental interests of the general public as its starting and ending point.Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is the core element of Chinese political discourse.It reflects unique insights of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core in governing the country and provides a guide for the development.Actively promoting the transmission of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is conducive to building a positive international image of China.It is also beneficial to make our voices heard,enhance our creativity,influence public trust and show Chinese characteristics to the world.According to Darwin’s theory of biological evolution,British scientist Dawkins first introduced the concept of memes.Meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution,which is similar to biological evolution in that it transmits culture through imitation and replication.Memes in a particular culture can be transmitted through the process of imitation.However,if the memes are to be transmitted across languages,and translators and readers lack bilingual or multilingual ability,it is necessary to rely on translation.Volumes Ⅰ-Ⅲ of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China contain speeches,talks,instructions and letters given by Xi Jinping during the period from November 15,2012,to January 13,2020.The English version is published by Foreign Languages Press for domestic and international distribution.Using this as corpus,this paper constructs an analytical framework based on the four stages of the replication of memes proposed by Heylighen:assimilation,retention,expression and transmission.This framework is also based on the general selection criteria for memes and the translation strategies proposed by Chesterman.This framework is used to analyze the translation and transmission of central political document Volumes Ⅰ-Ⅲ of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China from the perspective of memetics so as to solve the following three questions:(1)What kind of memes does Chinese political discourse belong to?(2)What strategies are used to translate these memes?(3)How are these linguistic memes replicated and transmitted?Based on these questions,this paper first analyzes the characteristics of Xi Jinping’s discourse in Volumes Ⅰ-Ⅲ of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China and concludes that there are a large number of strong linguistic memes in Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.And then it explores the translation strategies used for these strong linguistic memes.The analysis for the translation strategies is mainly conducted from the three aspects of syntactics,semantics and pragmatics.Syntactic and semantic strategies can preserve the semantic structures of the source text.Pragmatic strategies identify cultural equivalents in the target language so that the style of the source language can be replicated at a higher level.According to the four stages of meme replication proposed by Heylighen,the English translation of Chinese political discourse can be regarded as the process of Chinese political and cultural memes transmission through language.Translators allow English readers to understand China’s principles and policies of governance while preserving the uniqueness of Chinese political discourse,which truly promotes the development of Chinese national awareness discourse construction. |
