Tapping into the Present Political Translation and Editing in China: Problems and Pathways as Reported by Multi-players

Abstract

This study explores the recent history of political translation in China by analyzing the data reported by different players – the translators, foreign (language) experts and editors from China International Publishing Group and Foreign Languages Press – involved in the National Political Discourse Translation projects as represented by the translation and editing of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. They provide retrospective think-aloud data of the recent (political) translation history. By mining the data quantitatively and qualitatively, we gain access to the translation idea of the players, and it shows that actors of different identities and backgrounds play different roles. These players identify different issues in the translating and editing process and offer their solutions through varied pathways. Specifically, the translator-in-chief oversees the communicative effects of the core political ideas and ideology, and advocates the principle of “Chinese-primary Foreign Expert-secondary Cooperation”; the foreign expert, seeing himself as a guest, deals with the issues of cultural differences and the story-telling of Chinese thoughts, and puts forward the “Double-track Communication” pathway; the editor, positioning herself as the gatekeeper and quality-checker, stresses language accuracy and punctuation formats at a micro level and practices the “Three-editing & Three-proofreading” principle. The findings underline the power imbalance in translaboration that needs to be addressed in political translation projects. This study provides a practice-based perspective for the political translation projects of the day, and it also has implications for recent translation history research.