On Cultural Default And Its Translation In Soft Web-news Headlines From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

It is obvious that news headlines play a fairly important role in worldwidecommunication with Chinese reform deepening and opening-up expanding as well asforeign exchange increasing. Most of previous researches mainly focus on theperspective of journalism, stylistics, rhetoric, aesthetics and concrete translatingmethods. Under the guidance of relevance theory, the author discusses from threeaspects the major impact caused by the cultural default during the practice oftranslating web-soft news headlines, with an aim not only to provide propercompensation strategy and methods for the media translators but also skillfullyintroduce true and exclusive Chinese culture-loaded information to English readers.The author of this thesis collects749pieces of typical soft web-news headlinesgathered from www.china.org.cn from8thOctober of2012to9thApril of2013asresearch materials, adopting such research methods as the combination of comparisonand analysis, summarization, the combination of translation theory and practice, andquantitative and qualitative analysis.Major findings in this research by analyzing database are summarized. In the firstplace, cultural default is widespread in soft web-news headlines, especially the defaultof linguistic culture. In addition, the compensation of simplification is most frequentlyemployed, and recreation ranks second. Lastly, web-news headlines’ traits of SEO(search engine optimization) friendly requires their translation must not only faithfulto the original text but also satisfy the principle of SEO (search engine optimization).In conclusion, Relevance Theory has a strong power of explanation for thetranslation of soft web-news headlines, and seven compensation strategiesaccordingly can bridge cultural gap caused by cultural default. Under the backgroundof information globalization Era, the study of soft web-news headlines is of great value and profound meaning. This study, sticking to Chinese policy of reform andopen-up, bears a realistic significance in pushing Chinese culture and information tothe rest countries in the world.