The Functionalist Translation Approaches And C-E Translation Of Soft News

In terms of the nature, news can be basically divided into two types: hard news and soft news. Hard news generally refers to the up-to-the-minute news and events that deal with serious subjects and thus are reported immediately, such as political, economic and scientific news; while soft news focuses on social news, science articles, essays, travel guides, background information, human-interested stories, etc., which are characterized by flexible expressions, relaxing styles and interesting topics. Although sharing the basic features of news text such as accuracy, authenticity and brevity, soft news impresses people more owing to its rich affection, deep human touch and versatile language.With the acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid development of information industry, China's international status and international influence has greatly enhanced. More and more foreigners are eager to understand China, especially its time-honored history and far-reaching culture. At the same time, to seek further development in international market, China should also integrate itself into the international arena. Soft news, with its advantages, is playing an increasingly important role in the intercultural communication and becomes a window for other countries to get to know China. Excellent C-E translation of soft news can not only display China's new development and culture to the world, but also enhance mutual friendship and exchanges, and attract more foreigners to visit, invest, work, or live in China, so as to stimulate China's economic development and cultural prosperity.Because of its specificity, soft news translation needs sometimes to get rid of the constraints of the traditional "equivalence" theory, and adopt flexible strategies based on the audiences'needs and expectations, to attract foreign readers'interest and thus realize the purpose of cultural transmission and communication.Emerging in 1970s', the German functionalist translation approaches have made a breakthrough in the traditional equivalence of linguistic forms and defined translation as a purposeful behavior.Functionalist translation theory inherits the rational components of traditional translation theories, and meanwhile breaks away the shackles of traditional translation theories. This is mainly reflected in its shaking off the "equivalent" doctrine of the structuralism and the traditional perspective of translation studies. Under the functionalist translation theory, the evaluation standard of the translation is no longer "equivalence", but "appropriation", which means that the translation meets the requirements and needs of the readers, and can fulfill the purpose of the translation activity. As a great breakthrough and supplement to the traditional equivalence theory, the approaches have offered a new perspective for the research on translation theory and help us deepen our perception of the nature of translation acts and yield diversity of evaluation on translation.Under the direction of functionalist translation approaches, this paper tries to analyze the text types, translation purposes, as well as the reader's expectations of the C-E translation of soft news, and accordingly suggests three translation strategies, namely, abridgment, adaptation and interpretation, in a bid to effectively achieve its translation purpose of intercultural communication.