On E-C Translation Of VOA Bilingual News Leads

The news lead is an indispensable component in a piece of news, and the translation of it is a vital phase in news translation. So far,some scholars have made certain studies on translation of news and news leads, and have proposed some valuable insights. Nowadays, as the great emergence of bilingual news websites, the evaluation and studies on the translation versions in bilingual news become more and more important. However, studies on translation in bilingual news are relatively few.The author chooses translations in bilingual news as the research objects, and extracts English and Chinese news leads from www.voanews.cn and original Chinese news leads from www.gmw.cn and www.sina.com respectively. The corpora of Chinese translation and original Chinese news leads are of similar size. By contrastive study of English news leads and the corresponding Chinese translation in bilingual news, the differences in linguistic structure between English and Chinese news leads are clarified. Generally speaking, the Chinese translation of VOA news conforms to the rule of Chinese language expression to a great extent instead of translating English news leads literally. By contrastive study of the Chinese translation and original Chinese news leads, some obvious differences between them are shown clearly. Therefore, some further improvement shall be made to improve the Chinese translation in bilingual news, which needs proper theoretical guidance and translation strategies.This thesis is composed of six chapters:Chapter one introduces the research background, purpose and significance, as well as the methodology and data collection of the thesis.Chapter two introduces the concepts, characteristics and classification of news leads, provides a literature review of studies of news leads at home and abroad and further puts forward the limitations of previous studies.Chapter three analyzes the different linguistic structure of English news leads and its Chinese translation from semantic level, grammatical level and syntactic level, and then further analyzes different thinking modes between English and Chinese that result to the difference in linguistic structure.Chapter four analyzes the necessity of adopting semantic translation in VOA bilingual news first, then explores the distinctive characteristics of Chinese translation compared with original Chinese news leads, and finally analyzes the causes of the difference in linguistic structure.Chapter five concludes that Chinese translation of VOA news leads having its distinctive features is determined by the distinctive purpose of bilingual news. In this chapter, German functionalism is introduced firstly, then the distinctive aspects of purpose is illustrated, at last translation strategies for translating news in bilingual news are put forward.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis.All in all, this thesis explores the linguistic characteristics of Chinese translation of English news leads in VOA bilingual news by contrastive analysis of English-Chinese and Chinese-Chinese news leads, and further proposes corresponding translation strategies in E-C translation of bilingual news in terms of the guiding theory, German functionalism.