Strategies In English Translation Of Chinese Economic News: A Functionalist Perspective

As China has become the second largest economy in the world, media fromhome and abroad have attached great attention on the country’s economic reformand development and kept a close eye on China’s latest economic policies andregulations. Some of the well-known domestic media, such as Xinhua Net andPeople’s Daily, publish news on websites in several languages every day. Thushow to translate Chinese news into English and how to improve the translationquality post a challenge to the translators. Economic news carries very usefulmessage and information for investors or ordinary people who desire to know thecurrent economic situation. It’s both theoretically and practically meaningful tostudy the features and translating of economic news to better serve the needs ofthese people. The thesis tries to analyze the economic news translation under theguidance of functional theories and attempts to find out some useful suggestionsfor future study on this area.Functional theories have been proposed and developed by four Germanscholars, Katharina Reiss, Vemeer, Justa Holz Manttari and Christine Nord. Theyhave made their due contribution to the prosperity of the functional theories. Thefunctional theories shift from the static linguistic typologies of translation to afunctionalist and communicative approach to the analysis of translation and alsoraise useful suggestions on pragmatic translation. This thesis is to conduct C-Eeconomic news translation analysis under the guidance of the functional theories.It is found that domestic research on the English translation of Chineseeconomic news is rare. Most of these researches are conducted from theperspective of skopos theory while other functional theories are less beingmentioned. This thesis, being a helpful supplement, analyzes the translationproblems and strategies for economic news translation from the perspective oftranslation brief and translation-oriented text analysis. The five factors of translation brief define the whole translation process. While analyzing the sourcetext and target text, extratextual factors and intratextual factors should be paidequal attention in order to avoid possible translation errors. There are four kindsof translation errors, namely, pragmatic error, cultural error, linguistic error andtext-specific error. This thesis discusses relevant translation strategies to solvethese translation errors.As a whole, the functional theories are helpful and useful in guiding theEnglish translation of Chinese economic news. Therefore, this thesis is expectedto be further explored and deepened in translation teaching and translationstudies.