2. Literature Review

In recent years, much more attention has been paid to the translation of Report on the Work of the Government. 

In Foreign Language Research 2010, a paper, named A Corpus-based Analysis of Central Key Words in Chinese Government Work Reports, is based on the Report on the Work of the Government from 1978-2010 (Di Yanhua & Yang Zhong, 2010: 69). There is another paper from Foreign Language Research. The paper is based on the application of cohesion theory in political literature translation with the case study of Report on the Work of the Government 2010 (Hu Fengsheng, Jing Bo, and Li Xin, 2012: 89). Wu Guangjun, the professor of Beijing International Studies University, pointed the problem of unnecessary words in the English Version of Report on the Work of the Government 2010 and made some suggestions for improvement (Wu Guangjin, 2010: 64). In View on Publishing, based on the English Version of Report on the Work of the Government from 2010 to 2013, the author, Chen Hao, mainly focused on the translation of words with Chinese characteristics, such as well-off society, rural workers, combating corruption and promoting clean government Scientific Outlook on Development and etc (Chen Hao, 2013: 82).

Through the survey research in the Report on the Work of the Government 2011, it is found that foreigner readers had a better understanding in discourse level, however, the English version brought more problems in terms of vocabulary and sentence level(Wu Guangjun & Zhao Wenjing, 2013: 85).

The thesis is to investigate the nominalization in the Report on the Work of the Government 2014 and concludes the advantage of nominalization in the process of Chinese-English translation, such as conciseness and objectivity. The Report on the Work of the Government mainly focuses on the review of work in the previous year, general work arrangements and major tasks for the next year, which are separated from human participants.

Nominalization happens in language all over the world. In linguistics, the nominalization is the use of a verb, an adjective or an adverb as the head of noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. To some extent, the study of nominalization can be tracked to Ancient Greece Plato and Aristotle’s period. Although they did not put forward the term of nominalization, they pided word classes into nominal component and verbal component. The first man who put forward the concept of English nominalization is Jespersen. Since then, nominalization as one of the universal phenomenon has attracted widely attention from different schools and fields. 

Halliday argued that nominalization refers to any element or group of elements which can function as noun or noun group in a clause (Halliday, 2000: 41). From the viewpoint of linguistician, the main types of nominalization are to use the noun to indicate process or comments. According to Halliday, language is a multilevel system, including at least three levels-phonology, discourse and lexico-grammar, which are reflected by each other. There are two forms reflecting discourse semantics, named congruent form and incongruent form(Halliday and Ruqaiya, 1994: 320). Under the requirement of congruent form, the process should be reflected by verb. However, in the incongruent form, the noun can indicate process.