Survey of Explicitation Strategies in Chinese-English Translation of Political Texts of Contemporary Chinese Government

Abstract

Nowadays as China plays a more and more important role in the world, the exact conveying of “big country image” to the world is urgently put into agenda. In the process of political communication, political texts translation is of vital importance. It not only matters the interpretation of a country’s management concepts, foreign policies and political opinions, but also concerns with a country’s overall capacity and international status. Excellent political translation can contribute to forming a good country image internationally and can minimize the misunderstandings among countries. By proper political translation, countries can solve disputes through friendly negotiation and increase cultural exchanges. And China will embrace the “Chinese dream” and realize the goal of developing into a harmonious society. Nevertheless, many translation problems still exist in the political translation because of the differences in language use and culture, religion and geography. Many political translation texts only focus on the word-for-word equivalence, which brings many misunderstandings in the international communication. Explicitation strategies are urgently needed in political translation in order to clearly convey the meaning to readers and minimize the disputes occurred in translation.
In this paper, the researcher analyzes the Report on the Work of the Government Delivered at the Second Session of the Twelfth National Peoples Congress on March 5, 2014 and some of Chinese leaders’ important speech texts carefully. Through detailed examination of their English version, the researcher aims to find out the frequency, use and acceptance degree of explicitation strategies. On the basis of systematic knowledge of explicitation strategies, an agreement will be expected to be reached between explicitation strategies and political translation. Our final goal is to translate Chinese political texts in authentic English and change the previous obscure translation. In this paper, the researcher selects some texts as cases to study, and finally grasps the overall rules of explicitation strategies application. These rules of explicitation strategies will be put into future translation practices.