On English Translation of Metaphors in Government White Papers Under the “Political Equivalence” Theory: A Case Study of Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions (2021)

Abstract

With the increasing development of China’s economy and society, the government white paper has attracted more attention from the international community. In addition to promoting cross-cultural cognitive communication, appropriate metaphor translation is also of great significance to skillfully conveying attitudes and enhancing the effect of public opinion guidance. Metaphors in the white paper can be divided into metaphors shared and not shared by the Chinese and the West. Based on the translation principle of “political equivalence” proposed by Yang Mingxing, and taking the English version of Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions as an example, this study not only makes quantitative statistics on the metaphors in this White Paper on Climate by establishing a bilingual parallel corpus, but also qualitatively analyzes its metaphor translation, which summarizes the strategies of translating metaphors into English, so as to provide some reference for the translation of political metaphors with Chinese characteristics in the future.