In the 40th year of China's reform and opening up, the Chinese government released a white paper titled "Progress in Human Rights over the 40 years of Reform and Opening up in China" to take a look back at the development of human rights cause in the past four decades. The present author bases the research on this white paper and its English translation to examine closely the language features of both Chinese and English versions. What’s more, to analyze its translation principles. Last but not least, it discusses the more general principles of translating Chinese government publicity texts from the perspective of cross-cultural communication in a larger scope. The paper is meant to provide some reference for translating Chinese government publicity texts.

In the past decades, the scholars all over the world explored publicity texts from the following perspectives. Some papers discuss the influence of ideology on the translation of political texts based on the manipulation theory, which emphasizes a right political standing and a strong sense of self-identity. Based on the manipulation theory, this paper discusses the influence of ideology on the translation of political texts. When dealing with such texts, the translator must take a right political standing, maintain a high sense of nativeness, and comply with foreign readers' thinking habits (胡芳毅, 2014). Based on the SWOT (SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning）model of marketing area, Kong Lingcui makes an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the development of translation for international communication. The paper concludes that the translation strategies should be integrated organically and specifically in order to promote China's power of discourse and its national soft power in the international world (孔令翠,2018). In addition, semiotics of translation provides a new perspective for the study of international communication. According to it, the core of translation activities is the conversion of signs, the process of which involves sign-subject, semiosis, sign-action, inter-semiosis, sign-function. Semiotics of translation, as an emerging cross-domain study, has a deep fit with the characteristics of translating publicity texts in the new era. The nature of translating publicity texts is regarded as a semiotic transformation, which is conducive to solving the mechanism of cross-cultural equality(吕红周,2017). From the perspective of the ecological theory of translation, publicity translation is the translator's multi-dimensional adaptation and dynamic ethical choice in a cross-language and cross-culture context so as to make the publicity material achieve better communicative effect. It concludes that the translator gives full play to its subjective initiative, comprehensively considers the ecological beauty of the text, the multi-dimensional integration of language ecology, communicative ecology and cultural ecology, and dynamically makes a series of selection and adaptive activities in line with the ecological context of the translated language and the needs of the readers. Thereby creating a translation that is both true and enjoyable, and achieves effective delivery of publicity texts(张丽红，2014).

This paper mainly focuses on features and principles of translating Chinese government publicity texts from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The research conducts a case study based on the white paper “ progress in Human Rights over the 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up in China” with the purpose of studying the translation features in terms of lexicon, phrasal expressions, sentence patterns, and discussing the principles of translating publicity texts towards the western world.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

The paper has five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces research backgrounds, purpose, significance and the White Paper. The second chapter is literature review. Through the analysis and research of the literature, the author gets to know the features and principles of the translating publicity texts in previous studies. The third chapter is to analyze the White Paper from three aspects: lexicon, phrasal expression and sentence patterns. The fourth chapter is a discussion of features and principles of Chinese government publicity texts based on the analysis of the White Paper. The discussion is mainly about translation principles, namely, be faithful to the source text, be conducive to cultural exchange and be friendly to target readers according to the language features analyzed in chapter three. The last chapter is the conclusion, including research findings and limitations.

The purpose

The paper analyzes the White Paper “Progress in Human Rights over the 40 years of Reform and Opening up in China”. From the perspective of cross-cultural communication, exploring the translation features in terms of lexicon, phrasal expression, sentence patterns, and discussing the principles of translating publicity texts towards the westerns world.

Research methodology

1. Literature reading. The author reads the latest relevant research literature at home and abroad for the preparation of writing the thesis.

2. Case study. This paper mainly uses a case study method. Through textual analysis of the White Paper, the author studies the features and principles of the translating Chinese government publicity texts.

[1]Bahaaldin Alsoufi. Lost in translation[J]. The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, 2017.