Implicit Cohesion in Chinese Political Documents: A Translation Study

This paper is sponsored by the 2022 Tianjin Ren’ai College —Tianjin University Teacher Development Fund Project (FZ221012) “Research on the Logical Relations in the English Translation of Political Discourse.

Published: September 30,2025

Abstract

Political documents have laid a foundation for constructing a political discourse system that bridges Chinese and foreign communications. The C-E translation of political documents for international publicity is an effective means to disseminate China’s approach to governance to the world and to enhance the credibility, appeal and creativity of China’s foreign discourse. “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” provides us with a classic Chinese-English corpus of political discourse. From the perspective of discourse cohesion and coherence, the author analyzes the implicit logical expressions in Chinese political documents based on Halliday’s interpretation on “elaboration”, “extension”, and “enhancement”. Translators are supposed to identify the logic including parallelism, progression, transitions and cause and effect among the clauses in the original text, so as to choose the appropriate lexical and syntactic structures to complete the translation and make the translation more cohesive and coherent. This paper may also shed light on general principals in political discourse translation and furthermore, it may also be enlightening for building E-C political discourse corpus, and for modelling the semantic structures at discourse level for neural machine translation.

Keywords

Implicit cohesion; Political documents; Coherence

References

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How to cite this paper

Implicit Cohesion in Chinese Political Documents: A Translation Study

How to cite this paper: Fei Wang. (2025). Implicit Cohesion in Chinese Political Documents: A Translation Study. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(2), 309-315.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.09.003

Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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Implicit Cohesion in Chinese Political Documents: A Translation Study

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