Translator And Gatekeeper:On C-E Translation Of International Communication Materials

China's policy of opening up to the outside world has started a new era m the nation's long history of communication with foreign countries. The dramatic increase of international contact has led to the emergence of a huge quantity of international communication materials ranging from the books on China, pictorials of the tourist spots to the simple slogans on the street. A necessary information source for the foreigners to have an idea of China, the translation standard of these materials has aroused concern among the field of translation. This paper confines itself to the translation of the international communication material.With the departure point of comparing the meanings of "propaganda" against the backdrop of Chinese culture and western culture, author suggests that "duiwai xuanchuan" should be rendered into "international communication". Then the discussion is extended into the mass communication, particularly the international mass communication in the hope that an interdisciplinary observation of will shed a new light on the translational practice for the communicative purpose. A new notion comes up after examining the components of the communication process that the translator should work as the gatekeeper, who sift and sort out the message flow in order to minimize the semantic noise from the communicators and the psychological noise on the part of the audience. Examples are drawn to illustrate the occurrences of the commumcation breakdown and effective contact. On the one hand the discussion on the translational technique for the communicative aim has led to the conclusion that the overall frame of reference for the translator should not be the original and its function, as equivalence-based translation theory would have it, but the function the target text is to achieve in the target culture, on the other hand it provoke further thought on the translation ethics. To conclude the paper, a set of norms governed by the values of clarity, truth, trust and understanding are proposed to justify the notion of gatekeeping in translation.