News Translation From The Postcolonial Perspective

With the development of globalization, the economic, political and culturalexchanges between countries have become increasingly frequent and internationalexchanges are intensified, which also contributes to the rapid development of newsmedia. In this information era, the importance of news translation has becomeincreasingly evident. In recent years, many scholars have studied news translationfrom many different perspectives.With the cultural turn in translation, news translation is studied from culturaldimension as well as in a linguistic level. The translation of news is not a merelanguage conversion, but also cultural exchange. News translation is closely related toa country s politics, ideology and power differentials, which are the core concerns ofpostcolonial translation theory. Through the study of cultural differences, postcolonialtranslation studies reveal the unequal relations between different cultures and differentraces, thus deepening the understanding of translation practice. It is a new attempt tostudy news translation from postcolonial perspective.In the postcolonial context, translation can not only be used as a means ofcolonization, it can also be used as a means of decolonization. This paper focuses onpostcolonial tendencies and decolonizing translation skills in news translation.Postcolonial tendency is manifested in two aspects: news source text (ST) selectionand translation strategies selection of domestication and foreignization. It is found thatthe hegemonic states have dominated the output of news, and news translationselection is extremely limited in the dominated countries. So the news sources areextremely unbalanced, and most of the international news is from Western media,which leads to the fact that many reports of the Third World countries are translatedfrom Western media, while Western media seldom translate news from Third Worldcountries. The power differentials between strong cultures and weak cultures lead tothe different choices of translation strategies in news translation. Colonization in the postcolonial context is no longer achieved by making use of military forces, butthrough cultural penetration. Third World countries are affected unconsciously inculture and ideology. Therefore, the translators are used to taking strategies ofdomestication in Chinese-English (C-E) translation and foreignizaton inEnglish-Chinese (E-C) translation. To fight against the hegemonic culture, translatorshave taken some decolonizing translation skills, such as adaptation, recreating newstitles and transforming expressions. Translators use such translation skills to reach thepurpose of safeguarding our country s image, revealing truth and spreading ourculture.