ABSTRACT
Using largely acceptability-oriented strategies, Nam Fung Chang wished his Chinese translation of 'Yes Prime Minister' to be a well-formed literary text in the target system and a satire on Chinese politics by way of allegory. Yes Prime Minister, a sequel to the television programme Yes Minister, was published in book form by BBC Books in the late 1980s and has enjoyed great popularity in the source culture. In a few places, direct attacks on communism or China were deleted or diluted in the first draft of the translation, when it was intended for publication in mainland China. History has shown that translation can be used as a weapon to reform a culture or certain aspects of it. Compared to acceptability-oriented translations, indiscriminately 'faithful' translations are easier to produce because one needs only to imitate the author on the semantic and syntactic levels, with minimal attention to target-system conventions.
