Nord’s Functionalist Approach To The Research On C-E Education News Translation

With China’s higher position in international affairs and more chances in cross-cultural communication, news translation assumes an important role in communication with foreign countries and turns to be more frequent. The medium of news becomes various from newspaper, magazine to network, which, to a great extent, challenges news translation theoretically and practically. Functionalist theory provides a powerful tool to research news translation. According to the theory, text function is of great importance in the whole translation process and it determines the choice of translation strategies. Therefore, it is feasible for translators to adopt translation strategies such as proper deletion and make some changes to the ST after analyzing the intended communicative functions to make a translation brief.Education news is the transmission of education information, which happens recently to relevant people or things in education field and attracts much attention of the mass in a large social range. Backed up by Functionalist theory, the thesis is assumed to address the questions raised for the research, i.e. what translation strategies and methods are usually adopted in C-E education news translation judged by Nord’s Functionalist approach; what are extra-textual factors that influence C-E education news translation? And a tentative conclusion is made as follows:This thesis argues that translators should always take into account and maintain the special writing structure and other general features while translating in order to facilitate readers’ reading as well as translators’ work. Under the guidance of the Functionalist theory, the education news samples collected in the thesis are divided into three types, i.e. referential, expressive and mixed texts. Through making a thorough analysis and comparison of their respective translation briefs between ST and TT, it shows that the text functions of ST and TT are usually consistent in C-E education news translation. At the same time, based on the analysis of authentic education news samples, this thesis summarizes some translation strategies adopted in C-E education news translation, namely, addition, deletion, substitution and reorganization, which are instrumental translation, as well as literal translation and word for word translation, which are documentary translation according to Nord’s theory. Finally, the author tentatively analyzes extra-textual factors that influence the adoption of translation strategies in C-E education news translation, i.e. the communicative function of the translation, readers’ values and expectation vision as well as national emotions and ideology.It is expected that these findings may offer some guidance for news translation practitioners and may be helpful for future journalistic translator training, but at the same time, this research has its disadvantages. Efforts and contributions from all who are interested in this field that could further the study into a more comprehensive and thorough stage are encouraged.