Title: Division and Combination in Complete Translation: A Case Study of the English Translation of Chinese Political Documents

Abstract: Division and combination are the laws of the existence and development of the world. They are the unity of opposites and complementarities, whose interrelationship can be used to guide the translation process, balancing the form-meaning relationship between the source language and the target language despite their differences in philosophy, thinking patterns and syntactic structures. Through the proper application of division and combination, two of the seven methods in complete translation, it is more likely for translators to produce idiomatic translations with deverbalization. As applied writing, Chinese political documents are characterized by Chinese syntactic structure. This paper probes into division and combination in theoretical basis and operational process and discusses their specific applications in the translation practice of Chinese political documents with examples, to shed light in helping Chinese political discourse “go global.”

Keywords: division, combination, complete translation mechanism, Chinese political documents

Authors: Wei Guo, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China; Yuchun Xu, School of Foreign Languages, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.