On Translation Of English News Into Chinese: A Perspective Of Readers' Horizon Of Expectations

Being a major medium for information transmission, news has convincingly demonstrated its importance for political, economic and cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world. News translation, a second mass transmission, offers the international news for foreign readers in its special way and attracts constant attention. With the rapid growth of news translation, the study of news translation is increasingly attracting more attention from translation scholars. However, previous studies failed to discuss this translational activity in a systematic and integrated way. Most of the studies were confined to researches on its linguistic aspect, and adopted practical cases to demonstrate some translation principles or methods without strong theoretical support.As far as the text type is concerned, based upon Buler's classification of language functions, Peter Newmark classifies texts into three main types, that is, the expressive type, the informative type and the vocative type. And he argues that a text does not have only one function, but any text should have one major function. The functions of news text lie mainly on sending messages and then attracting readers; in other words, the main functions of news are functions of information and then persuasion. In the process of news translation, a successful communication relies on how well a piece of translated news is presented for the convenience of the reader. Moreover, Newmark holds that in the translation of informative and vocative types, more attention should be paid to the target language(TL) readers, and their different expectations and psychological feelings should be taken into account in the process of translation to obtain the expected communication effect. Furthermore, the development of reception aesthetics has presented us a good theoretical basis for receptor-centered translation of news.Generally speaking, the subjects and objects in the translation process include the source text, the author, the translator, the target text and the target text readers. In previous translation theories, the author-oriented paradigm or text-oriented paradigm has occupied a definitely predominant position. It has not taken the readers'reception into account, nor has it considered that translation strategies should depend on the readers'reception in the translating process. In the late 1960s, the birth of reception aesthetics provided a new methodology for translation research, which changes the text-centered model into the reader-centered one. Reception aesthetics redefines the role and status of readers and argues that readers play an important role in the choices of original texts and translation techniques. Based on the reception aesthetics, when doing translation, what a translator should primarily ponder over are the readers'horizon of expectations, their language, cultural acceptability and aesthetic characteristics and inner needs.With a view to widening the study of news translation, the thesis focuses all the attention on applying the readers'horizon of expectations, an important notion of reception aesthetics, to the practice of translation of news so as to prove the practicability and effectiveness of reception aesthetics on the study of news translation. According to reception aesthetics, the readers have their own world view, cultural knowledge, social experience and aesthetic tendency, and their consciousness is not empty before they read a literary work or when they are reading a literary work, which constitutes the readers'horizon of expectations. The reader is not a passive receiver but an active participant in interpretation. The translator should take the reader's role and status, especially readers' horizon of expectations, into adequate consideration in the process of news translation, whose work functions either by meeting those expectations or by challenging them. If the work meets it, fusion of horizons could be achieved soon; when the two conflicts, fusion of horizons could only be fulfilled until the reader's previous horizon of expectations is changed into a new one. Due to the different horizon of expectations, cultural traditions, life experience, ideology, the target text readers will influence translator's choice of translation strategies. Accordingly, news translation should not always be measured by the traditional equivalence-based translation standard of complete translation which always seeks for total fidelity to the original text, and some "intolerable" reader-friendly translation methods such as addition, deletion, substitution, and reorganization are also applicable in the translation of news.