On the Translation of Chinese Four-Character Phrase from the Perspective of Skopos Theory: A Case Study of 2022 Government Work Report

As a unique linguistic phenomenon in Chinese, four-character phrase has its distinguishing features: being concise and comprehensive in content, being neat and orderly in form, being rhythmical in pronunciation, and being infectious in expression. All of these make it popular in political speeches and documents. Choosing Chinese version and English version of 2022 Government Work Report as corpus, this paper counts the adopted four-character phrases, analyzes the translation strategies of different types of four-character phrases, aiming to explore the employed rules of the Skopos theory. According to the statistics and analysis, this study acquires the following findings: 1) The total of four-character phrases adds up to 1458. 2) Of all free four-character phrases, subordinating phrases have the highest frequency, followed by coordinating phrases, verb-object phrases and subject-predicate phrases. 3) Four translation strategies are employed, including literal translation for the Fidelity rule, liberal translation for the Skopos rule, omission for the Coherence rule and the Skopos rule, and amplification for the Skopos rule.