摘 要

政府工作报告作为政府每年发布的官方文件，是对政府过去一年的工作总结及对新一年工作的部署。报告涉及国家政治、经济、教育、国防、民生等多方面的方针和政策，是国际社会了解中国的一个重要窗口,政府工作报告的英译质量关乎国家形象。本文以2019年政府工作报告，特别是报告的第一部分2018年政府工作回顾为例，从词汇、句法、语篇三个层面对其中的长句进行了研究。通过对长句特点的研究，将政府工作报告中常见的长句分为了三类：含有缩略词的长句，无主句，及排比句；并且通过对中英文版本的对比，提出了长句翻译中应该遵循的表达准确，风格对等，逻辑连贯三个基本标准；通过举例分析，对政府工作报告长句翻译的策略进行了探讨，提出了词性转换、语态转换、增加主语、增加连词、分译等翻译方法。这些方法对长句翻译有比较实际的参考意义。

关键词：政府工作报告；长句翻译；翻译方法；翻译标准

Abstract

The Government Work Report (GWR), as an official political document, is a review of the past and a plan of the future. It introduces a lot about China, such as political principles, economy, education, national defense and people’s well-being, and provides a window for people to learn about China. The English version of GWR is related to our national image. This paper researches on long sentences in Government Work Report 2019, especially its first part—2018 in review, from lexical level, syntax level and discourse level. Through the study of features of long sentences in GWR, the author classifies them into three types— condensed sentences, parallel sentences and non-subject sentences. Based on comparison between the Chinese and English version of GWR, three basic translation standards are put forward—accuracy in expression, equivalence in style and coherence in logic. By analysis of examples, some translation methods are summarized, such as conversion of words, conversion of voice, addition of subject, addition of connecting words and division, which have significant influence on long sentence translation.

Key Words: Government Work Report; long sentences translation; translation methods; translation standards

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 Research on long sentence translation 3

2.2 Research on long sentence translation of Government Work Report in China 3

3 Long sentences translation in Chinese Government Work Report 5

3.1 Types of long sentences in Government Work Report 5

3.2 Standards for translation 8

4. Case Study: 2019 Government Work Report 10

4.1 On lexical level 10

4.2 On syntax level 11

4.3 On discourse level 12

5 Conclusion 16

References 17

Acknowledgements 19

Translation of Long Sentences in Chinese 2019 Government Work Report

1 Introduction

Report on the Work of Government, as an official document, is delivered by premier of China’s State Council annually in two sessions. This report can be divided into three parts: the review of the past year, overall requirements and policy directions in the next year as well as the tasks for the following years. It introduces a lot about China ranging from national economy, diplomacy principles, ethnic culture to people’s wellbeing. It provides guides for government work and policies about businesses and people’s ordinary lives. Thus great attention has been drawn from all over the country.

In addition, with the deepening of reform and opening up and the construction of socialist modernization, China has attracted worldwide attention. More and more foreigners are eager to know about China and hope to seek business cooperation or investment opportunities in China.(Yu: 2015) And this report provides a window for them to get the latest information about China.(武光军: 2014) Considering English is still the lingua franca, the C-E translation of the report has been popular among translators or even English-major students. Plenty of researches have been done on C-E translation of Government Work Report.

However, lots of translators feel pressured about this translation. On the one hand, this report is a represent of China. If translated inappropriately, serious misunderstandings or even diplomatic disputes will be caused. It may damage our nation’s international image and lead to irretrievable losses. On the other hand, it is difficult to do this translation because of the unique features of GWR. Long sentences are one of the most striking features of GWR, some of which are even more than 100 words. These long sentences account for the vast majority of GWR, which are quite difficult to understand let alone translating them. To some extent, the quality of our translation is decided by translation of these long sentences, whose accuracy has an effect on the smoothness of the version. Actually, it is common to see but hard to deal with these long sentences in our translation work because of their complex sentence structures, easy-misunderstanding logic relationship or the gap between these two languages. Thus methods on translation of long Chinese sentences need to be mainly emphasized.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Research on long sentence translation

Long sentences have always been a tough problem both in C-E or E-C translation. The average length of English sentence is 17.8 words or so. Connecting words and clauses are frequently used in English, which cause an effect of overt-cohesion.(连淑能: 1993) The Chinese sentences are usually composited by 7 to 12 words.(连淑能: 1993) But there are still lots of long sentences in written form. In recent years, many scholars have written articles to share their research achievements on this topic.

The difficulty of long sentence translation is directly caused by the huge differences between sentence structures of Chinese and English.(董力: 2002) These differences was summarized by Jia Yuxin(1997) in intercultural communication as follows: English sentences are highly formalized with strict syntactic structure. It centers on abstract noun and emphasizes on analysis instead of parataxis. Chinese sentences, on the other hand, focus on verbs while think little of the improvement of formal syntactic structure. And it has been universally acknowledged that parataxis and hypo-taxis are the most distinctive characteristic on sentence level.

After their study, effective methods on long sentences translation have been put forward. Luo Yanxiu(2005) summarized the E-C long sentences methods as embedding, cutting, recasting and splitting-off. Li Xiaohong(2017) also introduces some translation strategies such as negation, amplification, conversion, omission, and division. Some of these strategies mentioned before can also be applied to C-E long sentences translation. Under the guidance of these approaches, we have made great breakthroughs in our practice work.

2.2 Research on long sentence translation of Government Work Report in China

GWR is both a speech and an official report. It possesses strong political color, clear structure and rigorous logic. Comparing to other speeches, it uses more written words and long sentences rather than oral language(姜敏浩: 2015). Long sentences, as a significant feature of Chinese government work report, have appealed many researchers to explore. Xie Jing and Zhao Yushan(2018) write a paper named Translation of long sentences in government work report from the perspective of teleology. They analyze distinctive features of long sentences in GWR and emphasize three translation approaches—sequencing, division and structural adjustment. They point out sequencing and division are two most frequently used methods in GWR translation and these three methods need to be used flexibly if translators want to convey the original meaning vividly. In ‘A Study on the Translation Skills of the Government Work Report(2015) under the guidance of the Skopos Theory ’, Sun Xin(2017) summarizes language features of the Report from lexical level, syntactic level and rhetorical level and then put forward translation skills at these three levels. She mainly stressed three strategies of long sentence translation in GWR— division, adding subject, translating into passive sentences. Zhang Jingwen(2018) points out that most long sentences in GWR are non-subject sentences and then sums up four translation methods of non-subject sentences—adding subject, changing sentence voice, using dummy subject ‘it’ and using imperative sentence.

3 Long sentences translation in Chinese Government Work Report

3.1 Types of long sentences in Government Work Report

Most sentences in GWR share similar sentence patterns. The report contains few short sentences and various long sentences. Short sentences are often non-subject-predicate Sentence and just appear in the very first place of each paragraph, introducing the central topic of the whole paragraph. Long sentences take a leadership position, implying a compound, transitional, or progressive relationship. However, few conjunctions are used, that is to say, the internal logic relationship among sentences are implicit. In general, there are mainly three kinds of sentences, condensed sentences, parallel sentences and non-subject sentences.