Translation Strategies for Cultural Specifics in Political Documents: Case Study of the Translation of the Report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China

Abstract

As Chinese culture “goes global,” political documents have become a key medium for external communication. Taking the official English version of the 19th CPC National Congress Report as its corpus, this paper applies Javier Franco Aixelá’s eleven strategies for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) to the analysis of culture-loaded words and phrases. It further examines these strategies from the perspectives of domestication and foreignization, exploring how to minimize the limits of translatability and maximize translation acceptability so that China’s political message is accurately and effectively conveyed to international audiences.