A Functionalist Approach To The Adaptation Of News Reports On The Governmental Website

Based on the samples in"China Today"---the news section on the website of the Central People's Government of the PRC, dating from December 14, 2009 to December 20, 2009, this thesis is a comparative analysis of the Chinese news items and their translation. It is found that appropriate adjustments and relevant translation strategies have been adapted in dealing with the contents, the structure, the headlines and the leads, such as addition, deletion, rewriting and restructuring. In a strict sense, such methods can be categorized as adaptation, for they violate the traditional translation standard of"faithfulness."The functionalism attaches much importance to the role of the target reader. The functionalists emphasize that the target reader is an essential factor in translation and it is this factor that determines the translation process. News cannot live without the reader for it serves the target reader. Whether a rendering is successful or not depends on whether it could be accepted by the target reader. That is to say, readers'acceptability is the key criterion in evaluating a translation.The functionalism mainly explains why we should adapt the source text, while adaptation illustrates how we do it in this way. Therefore, adaptation can be considered as the embodiment of the functionalism. The news on the website of the Central People's Government of the PRC has special features, such as authority, full of political jargons and slogans, neologisms, redundancies and quotations. In addition,the English version of this website is especially constructed for the foreign readers as well as the overseas students and compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Thus, adaptation translation has gained its possible existence in order to make the English version more reader-friendly; meanwhile, major adaptation strategies are most frequently used, such as deletion, addition, rewriting and restructuring.On interpreting the selected C-E news samples, this thesis intends to justify news adaptation on the website of the Central People's Government of the PRC both from the theory and practice. It is hoped that the research results will be a reference for news translation in the governmental websites and even for the English version of the websites at all levels.