Proceedings of the 2024 6th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2024)

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The Re-contextualization of the Translation of the “Yào”Sentence in the Chinese Government Work Report

Authors
Wei Wang1, Lei Zhu2, *
1Lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jianqiao University, Shanghai, China
2PhD, Lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China
*Corresponding author. Email: zhulei@shupl.edu.cn
Corresponding Author
Lei Zhu
Available Online 14 December 2024.
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_50How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Government Work Report; Contextualization; Modal Words; “Yào” Sentence
Abstract

The study features a self-built bilingual parallel corpus, which consists of a collection of work reports from 2012 to 2022 by the Chinese government. We investigated functions of the “yào” sentence and the translation of the modal word “yào”. The translators recontextualized the sentences containing the character “yào”, and comprehensively considered the constraining factors such as the linguistic characteristics, cultural context, and cultural differences between Chinese and English in the government work report. The study revealed the following: for expressing the specific function of giving instructions to various interlocutors, the translator considered the type of interlocutors and the speech act types, to recontextualize the particular word “yào” and other components of the “yào” sentence in the translation. Besides, the translation of “yào” is closely related to the interpersonal meta-function in systemic functional linguistics. The translator adopts “Element Replacement” as the chief translating strategy, by using words or phrases with medium or high modal values, such as “must”, “should”, “will”, “need to”, “have to”, etc., to translate “yào”, excluding words with low modal values in the translation. The addition, deletion, and reorganization of elements involve the explicit or implicit addressees and the shift of active and passive voice in the translation.

Copyright
© 2024 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2024 6th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2024)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
14 December 2024
ISBN
978-2-38476-319-1
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_50How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2024 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

risenwbib
TY  - CONF
AU  - Wei Wang
AU  - Lei Zhu
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/14
TI  - The Re-contextualization of the Translation of the “Yào”Sentence in the Chinese Government Work Report
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 6th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 431
EP  - 443
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_50
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_50
ID  - Wang2024
ER  -