C-E Soft News Translation With A Functionalist Approach

With the increasingly strengthened intercultural and technological communication, the world is gradually turning into a global village. Events happening beyond our borders may have great impact on our life, and we are also eager to show a real China to the world. News communication becomes more important to the political, economic and cultural exchanges between China and the world. News translation, serving as a window of mutual understanding, offers objective information for foreign readers.News stories are basically classified into two types in accordance with the nature of events: hard news and soft news. Hard news generally refers to up-to-the-minute news and events that are reported immediately, while soft news refers to the background information or human-interest stories. Although sharing the basic features of the news text such as exactness, authenticity and proximity, soft news impresses people more owing to its rich affection, deep human touch and vivacious language. The novelty of soft news easily attracts the readers' attention through its flexible reporting style and interesting content. The C-E soft news translation may present the new development of China and the new spirit of Chinese people to increase friendship and mutual understanding. Therefore the C-E soft news translation holds the balance on information transmission.Soft news translation is not just a linguistically decoding between Source Language (SL) and Target Language (TL), but often a specialized adjustment process depending on the target culture, in other words, a process focusing on the target readers' expectations, arousing their resonance, and eventually realizing the intended communication effect. The weakness of explanatory force of the traditional equivalence-based translation theories has become more obvious, especially in dealing with the soft news translation due to the shortcomings of the theories and the "soften" of the soft news report. However, some translation methods "intolerable" in the traditional theories such as editing, interpretation, abridgement and reformulation are suitably used in the C-E soft news translation. Hence, it urgently needs a theory workable to guide the practice.The functionalist translation theory dethrones the stiff model of structuralism and breaks through the limitations of the traditional "Equivalence" theory. Based on the theories of action and cross-cultural communication, functionalism takes skopos as the primary principle. The whole theory bears great applicability and maneuverability in the translation practice. The thesis adopts text typology and some basic concepts of Skopos theory to analyze the C-E soft news translation. Since soft news has predominate function of "informative" and "operative", the core of the C-E soft news translation is to transmit information objectively and affect foreign readers to realize the expected communication and propaganda effect. The author has collected Chinese and English versions of the authentic journal China Today of 2006 as the study materials. With the text type analysis and the application of the functionalist translation theory, we will recognize the specialty of soft news and the great role the functionalist approach played in the C-E soft news translation. Lastly the author proves that domestication orients in the C-E soft news translation and the "intolerable" translation methods are justified according to functionalism, and puts forward that the absolute "faithfulness" is impossible in the C-E soft news translation. Functionalism hence plays an important role in guiding the C-E soft news translation.