Abstract
Many Chinese scholars have studied the features of Chinese political texts and given their different views on Chinese-English translation of this text type. The formal, formulaic expressions employed in this text type often result in unnatural or awkward English translations when rendered literally. Although senior translators can skillfully avoid such literalness, some of their translations can still be unnatural, ambiguous or even confusing because of their deep-rooted Chinese way of thinking. This paper examines ambiguous reference, non-native usage of word, unnatural collocation, and unidiomatic phrasing—translations that are grammatically sound but stylistically awkward or unclear to native English-speaking audience. By analyzing these examples from publicized political documents, this study proposes solutions for Chinese translators to produce more fluent and natural translations. Even political texts are meant to be well understood by the foreign audience; therefore, they should be rendered in a more nat-ural way. And Chinese translators should focus more on the English language itself, familiarize themselves with idiomatic usage, traditional collocations and the usual ways of expressing ideas in the English language.
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