A Functionalist Approach To E-C Transediting Of News Report

In the context of globalization, news translation plays an increasingly important role in cross-cultural communication. Transediting, a special variety of translation and an effective translation method, has been consciously or unconsciously applied in the practice of news translation. Many scholars both at home and abroad have made their own contributions to news translation and transediting from different perspectives. However, generally speaking, the current studies on English-Chinese news transediting in China lack in consistency and theoretical support. Therefore, this thesis intends to further explore news transediting under the guidance of the functionalist translation theories so as to expand the study scope of transediting.The German functionalist theories emerged in the 1970s when the equivalence-based linguistic theories dominated in the field of translation studies. Different from the latter, functionalist theories place translation studies into a wider context of culture. Without insisting upon a perfect translation as an ideal, the functionalists attach great importance on the purpose of the target texts, the communicative functions of the translation and the target addressees. According to the functionalist theories, translation is a purposeful cross-cultural activity; the purpose of the target text determines translation process and translation methods and the source text is regarded as only an offer of information, which opens up a new perspective for the study of translation, transediting in particular.Transediting, simply speaking, refers to the combination of editing and translating, an effective integration and processing of information. As a type of pragmatic texts, news texts, especially the general hard news, mainly belong to informative texts whose translation purpose is to inform the readers. News translation is not simply the transfer from the source news in one language to the target text in another language, but also takes into consideration the acceptability or readability of the target text as well as its intended communication effect in the target culture. It stresses on the timeliness, accuracy, flexibility and conformity to the journalistic conventions of the target text. Thus, transediting, the process of purposefully selecting, deleting, adding or restructuring the source text, serves as an effective tool in news translation. Adequate transediting will help the reader better understand the facts in the news and improve the efficiency of news transmission in the target culture so as to achieve better communication effect. Furthermore, transediting involves many participants who have different roles or purposes. Among them, the roles of the transeditor and the TT receiver can not be overlooked. Transeditor is the core role of the whole transediting process and functions simultaneously as the ST receiver, the TT producer, the editor as well as the communicator. S/he should be responsible for the ST, the initiator, the TT and the TT receiver. The TT receivers or target addressees are an important component of translation brief and also the final judge of the translation. Hence, their culture-specific knowledge, reception capability, communicative needs and reading habits should be taken into consideration. In addition, linguistic, cultural or ideological differences should be handled properly in news transediting.Based on Nord's translation-oriented text analysis model, the thesis proposes a tentative top-down model for news transediting, including news selection, identifying translation brief and making comparison with the ST, presuming possible problems and selecting specific transediting techniques and evaluating the TT. A case study is conducted following the procedure based on a piece of source news from Reuters and two transedited versions from People's Daily Online and Reuters Chinese website. After comparison between the ST and the TT, the author finds out that due to different purposes and target addressees, both versions make considerable alterations in the source news, including deleting redundant, lengthy or less important words, sentences or paragraphs, adding background information, substituting and restructuring the information in conformity with the journalistic conventions of the target text. This thesis verifies the instructive and evaluative roles of functionalist theories in news transediting, which may shed some light on the further study on this topic.