The Translation of Political Words With Chinese Characteristics
- A study on Report to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China

ABSTRACT
With the development of society and speeding up of economic globalization, communications between China and other countries in the world have become increasingly frequent. Political documents become the most direct and authoritative source of information for the outside world to know about China. Therefore, the translation of political documents plays a significant role in China's external publicity. This study, in two parts, focuses on the political words with Chinese characteristics in the political documents. In the first part, by studying the Report to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China with both its Chinese version and English version, the author aims to analyze the features and methods of political words translation. In the second part, the author focuses on the changes in the translation of political words of the Report to the 13th, 16th, 17th and 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The author attempts to probe into the changes from the perspective of semantic translation and communicative translation, which are two translation approaches presented by British translation theorist Peter Newmark in his book A Textbook of Translation. His twin methods contribute a lot to the general translation theories and are recognized as Peter Newmark’s most influential achievement in translation studies. In the light of semantic translation and communicative translation, the author analyzes the cause of the changes in the political words translation.
Keywords: Political documents, Political words with Chinese characteristics, Translation
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction1
Chapter 2 Literature review1
Chapter 3 Translation methods in the Report to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China2
3.1 Flexible use of literal translation and free translation-2
3.2 Observing the target language conventions-4
Chapter 4 Changes in the translation of political words in the Reports -5
4.1 Changes of the terms because of different understanding-5
4.2 Changes in translation strategies-7
Chapter 5 Conclusion-10
Bibliography11