Translating As A Purposeful Action

Soft news is a practical genre with its own peculiarities. As one of essential types of news, soft news exerts great influences on people's daily life. Translating Chinese soft news into English primarily aims at providing the information about all aspects of China for foreigners, thus broadening mutual understanding, and improving intercultural communication between nations.In view of the peculiar characteristics of Chinese soft news, the C-E translation of soft news should be distinct from the translation of other genres. Linguistic and cultural barriers, translator's incompetence in the process of translation and communication, and the differences between China's communication industry and that of western countries all pose difficulties in C-E translation of soft news. At present, the rigid way of C-E translation of soft news in China has resulted in some unintelligible or incorrect translated works and the informative and communicative function of source soft news cannot be fulfilled. Thus, the positive propaganda effect highly expected has seldom been reached. Viewed from this point of view, the study of the C-E translation of soft news is a comparatively less explored area, where there is a conspicuous lack of a guiding theory.In order to compensate for the limitation, this thesis sets out to introduce the application of Skopostheorie from the German functionalist school into the C-E translation of soft news with special reference to the basic rules and theories of this approach: fidelity rule, skopos rule, coherence rule, translation poly-criteria and translator as communication expert. The author of the present thesis puts forward that C-E translation of soft news should focus on positive propaganda effect, complemented by some other dynamic translation criteria, which are identical with the poly-criteria advocated by Skopostheorie. In addition, the author states that Skopostheorie encourages the soft news translators as experts at both Chinese and English culture and language and as experts at knowledge of communicative functionin communication science. With this view, the C-E translators of soft news should be qualified communication experts. Each translator is expected to produce a functional translatum ( i.e. a translated text ) by selecting certain information from the ST and create the information (i.e. editing translation) in the light of the pre-determined skopos to achieve the maximum positive publicity effect of soft news.