Abstract

An energy white paper is seen as an important type of ecological discourse on energy. The English translation of Chinese government energy white papers is crucial to showcase China’s energy polices to the global community. Guided by Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory, this study establishes an analytical framework focusing on both structural adaptation at lexical, syntactic and discourse levels and communicative adaptation to the mental, social and physical worlds of the target readers. It also explores the translator’s linguistic choices (translation strategies) in the white paper China’s Energy Transition and their motivations behind. The findings reveal that the translator has used free translation for culturally bound terms, reordering to align with English preference for directness, and the translation technique of addition to bridge the knowledge gaps for an international audience. It concludes that the translation process is a dynamic process in which the translator makes adaptive choices at the contextual and linguistic structure levels to achieve ideological fidelity and effective cross-cultural communication.

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