A Study On C-E Soft News Translation From A Relevance-theory Perspective

With the rapid development of economic globalization and information industry, the world is gradually turning into a global village. Our life is flooded with all kinds of news everyday, every hour, which make us keep breathing with the world. News communication becomes more and more important to the political, economic and cultural exchange between China and the world. Events happening beyond our borders may have great impact on our life, and we are also eager to show a real China in front of the world. News translation is one of the most significant methods to promote cultural communication and enhance mutual understanding.In terms of the nature, news stories are basically divided into two types: hard news and soft news. Hard new generally refers to up-to-the-minute news and events that are reported immediately, while soft news is background information or human-interest stories. Although sharing the basic features of news text such as accuracy, authenticity and proximity, soft news impresses people more owing to its rich affection, deep human touch and versatile language. The Chinese-English soft news translation may present the new development of China and the new spirit of Chinese people to increase friendship and mutual understanding. However, the weakness of explanatory force of traditional equivalence-based translation theories has become more and more obvious, especially dealing with soft news translation due to the shortcomings of the theories and the "soften" of the news text.Relevance theory, proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, is a branch of pragmatics, focuses on human communication and cognition. The major function of news is to give information and to achieve communication. In fact, translation is also an activity of language use and communication involving two different languages, namely, an interlingual communication. Relevance-theoretic account of translation studies tends to provide a unified framework to explore the wide range of translation phenomenon. It sheds new light on the translation studies, while it leaves much room for newcomers to explore such as the application of his theory into actual translating practices.Therefore, the author gives a thorough interpretation of the translation process and methods under the framework of relevance theory based on the actual pairs of Chinese soft news and the counterpart English versions well selected from authoritative bilingual magazines. The author attests the explanatory force of relevance theory to soft news translation and shows that the aim of all the translation methods is to provides adequate contextual effects and achieve optimal relevanceto the target audience, namely, to guarantee the successful communication — the intentions of the communicator and the expectations of the audience meet.