Functional-Equivalence Approaches To The Translation Of News

With China's entry into WTO, it is of great significance to condunct active communications with the other nations. As news has become a window through which the world can learn about China, news translation is brought into prominence. In view of the fact that English is the universal language in our modern world, news translation between English and Chinese has its undeniable importance in our social activities.However, a careful study shows that within the circle of translation studies in China, not enough studies can be found on news translation, let alone those from theoretical perspectives.Eugene A. Nida is a representative among the scholars that focus on equivalence between the source text and the target text, and his functional equivalence theory shows great respect to the reader's response. Compared with those scholars who stress on the relationship between the source language and the target languase, Nida put more emphasis on the relation between the text and its receptors. Since his functional equivalence theory emphasizes on meaning other than form and attaches importance to the reader's response, there is feasibility to integrate this theory with news translation, which has flexible features than the other formal texts and whose primary function is to meet the receptors'needs.News should be translated under the guidance of certain strategies, and the author holds that Nida's functional equivalence theory can provide a practical way for it. After ananlyzing quantities of English and Chinese news texts, the author puts forward several techniques under the guidance of this theory and discusses how these techniques are put into practice at different levels.This thesis is intended to prove the feasibility of applying functional equivalence theory to news translation from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It begins with the introduction of news. Then it comes to the literature review in which the functional equivalence theory is probed into. In the following part, the emphasis is on how to integrate functional equivalence theory with news translation. After listing major barriers existed in news translation, the author applies some techniques to overcome them. At last, on the basis of the discussions and comparison between English and Chinese news texts and their translated versions, it is safely concluded that"the closest natural equivalence"can be effectively achieved by applying the techiniques proposed in the light of this theory.This thesis falls into five chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction to the whole thesis.Chapter Two specifies the subject studied in this thesis—news. Some basic knowledge is introduced, including the definition, the categorization and features of news.Chapter Three states the main content of Nida's functional equivalence theory. As there always exist some misunderstandings about certain concepts in this area, some of them are clarified including correspondence, formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Meanwhile, in view of the significant role of the reader's response in Nida's theory, the author emphasizes how it works throughout the whole process of news translating.Chapter Four firstly reviews the possibility of applying functional equivalence theory to news translation. Then several barriers in news translation are pointed out and discussed, in which some effective techiniques are proposed to overcome them. Chapter Five mainly focuses on exploring how to integrate the functional equivalence theory with practical translating process.