ABSTRACT:The Government Work Report (GWR), one of the most important gateways for other countries to know about China’s latest political tendency, serves a prominent role in facilitating communication and enhancing strategic trust. Therefore, its translation quality is of crucial importance in delivering to the international community its political stand and latest policies concerning various aspects of people’s social life. 

Information theory, introduced and developed by Shannon, presents notions such as communication load, channel capacity and redundancy, which largely expends the possibility of combining information theory and translation. After that, Nada firstly applies information theory to translation studies. He believes translation is a part of information transmission, and therefore can be used to explain some problems in translations.

This paper, under the guidance of information theory, aims to analyze redundancy in C-E translation of the 2017 GWR and find out effective ways to deliver accurate and exact information to target readers, avoid Chinglish and keep redundancy balance in translation. It firstly gives a brief introduction to the linguistic features of the GWR, some challenges and difficulties in the GWR translation. Then, based on some specific examples and analysis, it makes a comprehensive and detailed research on redundancy in GWR translation from the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. It is found that redundancy appears due to the cultures differences between English and Chinese as well as Chinglish; appropriate amount of redundancy in translation is necessary while insufficient or excessive redundancy may either cause target reader confused or produce a lengthy target text. Therefore, in order to produce a comprehensible and acceptable translation to target readers, translators should apply certain translation strategies and methods and appropriately add, adjust or delete redundant information in translation to maintain redundancy balance.         

Keywords: GWR; information theory; redundancy; translation methods  

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT

中文摘要

1-Introduction-1

2-Literature Review-2

2.1-Previous Studies on the Application of Information Theory in Translation-2

2.2-Previous Studies on Redundancy in C-E Translation-3

3-Analysis of Government Work Report and Its Translation-4

3.1-Overview of GWR-4

3.2-Challenges and Difficulties in GWR Translation-5

3.2.1-Chinglish-5

3.2.2-Translation of New Terms and New Concepts-6

3.3-Translation Principles in GWR Translation-7

3.3.1-Faithfulness-7

3.3.2-Readers-Orientation-7

3.3.3-Content-Centeredness-8

4-Information Approach to Redundancy in C-E Translation of GWR-9

4.1-General Introduction to Redundancy-9

4.1.1-Definition of Redundancy-9

4.1.2-Functions of Redundancy in C-E Translation-10

4.1.3-Redundancy Equivalence, Surplus and Insufficiency-11

4.2-Analysis of Redundancy in GWR Translation-12

4.2.1-Redundancy at Lexical Level-12

4.2.2-Redundancy at Sentential Level-13

4.2.3-Redundancy at Discourse Level-14

4.3-Translation Strategies Used to Achieve Redundancy Equivalence-14

4.3.1-Omission-14

4.3.2-Amplification-16

4.3.3-Interpretative Translation of Culture-Loaded Words-16

5-Conclusion-17

References-19