On Journalistic English And Its Translation

Nowadays news is becoming more and more indispensable to people's life. One of the traditional media for news' s transmitting is newspaper with a more stable written form. As part of public life, this form of media has borrowed words, phrases or expressions from society and at the same time generated a lot of new language form and usage that will influence people's everyday speech in turn. It has developed into a branch of modern stylistics with the name Journalistic language.Recently more and more attention has been directed to the study of journalism and journalistic language and thus contributed to steady progress in this field. But there is still one problem remaining: Most of researches are done within one individual language, either on journalistic English only or on journalistic Chinese only. What is demanded urgently is to break the boundary between different languages and exploit a wider space for the development of studies on journalistic style and translation. It is really a pity that the necessity of contrast to translation is not systematically applied to practice yet. In this paper I attempt a contrastive analysis on journalistic style in both English and Chinese so as to improve the quality and efficiency of news translation.This paper is not only aiming at researching into the stylistic features of journalistic English and Chinese, but making a contrast between the features of a congeneric style in two different languages. I hope through this study to find out thesimilarities and distinctions, especially the latter, that are of great use for news translation. Two theories are contributing greatly to the theoretical basis of my discussion: contrastive analysis and Nida' s translation theory of "functional equivalence". Here stylistics will be taken as the theoretical frame of the whole paper. Chapter one concerns some essential categories in news like definitions, news values and the five W's and an H to clarify certain concepts, to prepare for furtherdiscussion of related subjects.In the second chapter my expatiation is outspreaded in a headlines-lead-body order, covering the three most important compositions of news structure. Systematic work has been done to make the research more scientific, more convictive and so more helpful in the end to translation.In chapter three I focus on the translation of news with emphasis on practicability. As one of the practical styles, translation of news should take into account the social effect of the translated text as the original has and the response of readers of the target language. Specified methods in translation are displayed respectively on different levels, such as discourse, syntax, lexicon and rhetoric. The translation of news must be practical to meet the requirements of the fast tempo of life on the basis of faithfulness, expressiveness, clearness and readability.Chapter four is to theorize the methodology and approaches I apply in this paper. I take Nida' s "functional equivalence" as the theoretical direction and criteria in news translation, though the theory does not set any fixed method for translating. In fact in order to achieve this equivalence in the translated news text with "closest natural language", I have employed different methods that are suitable for different circumstances. They are literal translation, free translation and condensed translation, to name a few of them only. The last part of this chapter deals with the problems in news translation and gives resolution from a concrete point of view.Chapter five concludes the whole paper.