The Analysis Of English-Chinese News Translation From The Functionalist Perspective

For centuries, the idea of"equivalence"dominated translation theory and practice. Despite the attempts of the traditional equivalence-based translation theory to define and prescribe the parameters for successful translation production, there still exist practical problems that can not be solved well. Then, one question rises with the time, that is: should"equivalence"be the only standard of translation? From the analysis in the thesis, Traditional"equivalent"is no longer a perfect concept for translation criterion and new theories are called for. Functionalism emerged in 1970s, which prefers the word"adequacy"as the new criterion of translation rather than equivalence.This thesis aims to analyze the E-C News Translation from the functionalist perspective in the hope of elaborating the application of functionalism and finding a workable guiding theory for E-C News Translation.In this thesis, the author collected news materials from a wide coverage. Original English news are chosen from The New York Times, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, BBC News, Financial Times, etc, while corresponding Chinese ones are from Can Kao Xiao Xi and Global Times, both being the authorized presses to reship foreign medias directly. By analyzing these materials from the functionalist perspective, the author summarizes the most seen strategies in the materials. On the basis of the practical analysis and relevant functionalist theories, the author proposes four procedures for the E-C news translation, which are: (a) constituting an explicit translation brief; (b) source-text analysis; (c) adopting a top-down approach; (d) realizing functional adequacy. The four procedures are not independent but interwoven with each other in translation.Although dozens of studies on functionalism have been carried out in many fields over the past years, the field of E-C News Translation has not been paid enough attention to. Therefore, it's of great necessity to establish a set of practical and comprehensive principles for E-C News Translation. The author hopes that this thesis will help to optimize the E-C news translation targeted at Chinese speaking audiences. In the end, more achievements in this area are expected.