On Point Of View In Discourse And Information Transmission In English-Chinese News Translation

The construction of a discourse is not only an activity of arranging the language forms, but is also involved with the psychological cognition of the writer who makes arrangements of the language forms to transmit certain information and to give out his writing intention, which is generally known as point of view in discourse.Point of view in discourse can be categorized into spatio-temporal, ideological, narrative, and perceptual point of view. These four kinds of point of view in discourse integrate with each other in influencing the information transmission of the discourse by acting on such language forms as choice of lexis, syntactic structure, person, and tense, etc. The information transmitted within the discourse conversely reflects the point of view in discourse.According to Beaugrande and Dressier, the information within the sentence can be divided into three orders of occurrence, each order standing out for its carrying capacity of unknown or unexpected information.As English and Chinese differ in language systems, cultural backgrounds and even social factors, a faithful translation of the source news texts might make the information transmitted in the target text be of different orders of occurrence from that in the source text and thus unreadable or unacceptable by the readers of the target language. Actually, with the purpose of being "readable" for the readers who buy the newspapers, some information is inevitably added or deleted so that the information transmitted in the target text could be of the same order of occurrence as that in the source text, which would violate the translating principle of "faithfulness" and even bring in the change of point of view in the source text.Guided by the "informative theory" put forward by Beaugrande and Dressier, and based on the analysis of the 50 English news texts and their Chinese translation, this thesis makes analysis of the information change in news translation and its relations to the change of point of view in discourse and puts forward a suggested way to balance the translation's "faithfulness" to the source text and "readability" for the readers of the target language.