A Postcolonial Perspective On News Translation

The globalization and intensified intercultural communication lead to a rapid growth of news communication in this information era. News translation is taking a more and more important role in modern society. In recent years, some scholars try to apply different theories to news translation studies both from the linguistic perspectives and cultural perspectives.News translation is not a mere linguistic transformation, but also a cultural exchange. News translation is related to politics, economy, culture, and other fields; it also reflects power differentials between different nations and different cultures. This thesis attempts to discuss news translation from the perspective of postcolonialism, which focuses on cultural aspects of translation. Postcolonialism employs the research achievements of anthropology, politics, sociology, culture, philosophy, literature, history and psychological analysis to build a new paradigm of translation criticism through analyzing texts from different cultures. In the postcolonial context, translation studies is no longer a simple linguistic research, but takes into account the external impacts on translation, such as historical, political and ideological factors. It is a new trial to study news translation from the perspective of postcolonialism. News translation is closely related to a nation's politics, ideologies, and power-relations, all of which are the main concerns of postcolonialism.This thesis discusses news translation from the postcolonial perspective, including news ST selection, news translation strategies of domestication and foreignization and specific decolonial translation skills in news translation. This research shows that hegemonic countries hold the predominant power of news issue, which restricts the selection of ST, so most of the translated news is from western media. The power differentials between strong cultures and weak cultures lead to the adoption of different translation strategies. Generally speaking, translators adopt domestication in C-E news translation, while employ foreignization in E-C news translation. In order to fight against the hegemonic cultures, translators usually adopt some decolonization methods, such as adaptation, rewriting news titles and canceling or changing attitudinal terms.