A Contrastive Analysis of Lexical Features of Government Work Report for 2020 and Its Translation—From the Perspective of Halliday’s Three Meta-Functions Theory

Abstract

The translation of government work report (GWR) should not only be faithful to the spirit of the original text, but also close to the stylistic features of target language and the context. These features correspond to the Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual functions of Three Meta-functions Theory, which is of great research value in the current circumstance beset by COVID-19. Taking 2020 GWR as the research material due to its special social environment, this paper makes a systematic comparative study of lexical features between the source text and its English translation based on three meta-functions theory. Through quantitative statistics and qualitative text analysis, the realization and distribution of three meta-functions in the source text and its translation are discussed. At the same time, the reasons for the equivalence and non-equivalence between two texts are explored to summarize corresponding modification suggestions and translation strategies. Through comparative analysis, it is found that for ideational process, the discrepancy is significant in terms of material and relational processes between the source text and its translation. For interpersonal function, the source text mainly uses modal operators of high value while the translation the median. And for textual function, there were many additions of first-person plural pronouns in translation due to its writing habits. These findings can help better understand the language mechanism and connotation of the translation of GWR, thus enriching their research perspective to some extent.