On The English Translation Of Chinese Soft News From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Globalization allows people from all countries to exchange their ideasconveniently and learn from each other’s cultures through various channels, amongwhich soft news plays a vital role in transmitting the native cultures to the world. Softnews refers to news of human interest, which is written in an ease way and can getimmediate response from the readers. Thus, great importance should be attached tothe translation of soft news in a proper way. This thesis focuses on the research oftranslating Chinese soft news into English from the perspective of adaptation theory.From a pragmatic perspective, Jef Verschueren regards “using languages” as“making linguistic choices”. He points out the three properties of language: variability,negotiability and adaptability and raises the four angles of investigation: contextualcorrelates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability,salience of the adaptation processes.Based on the data collected, the author first compares the Chinese soft news withthe English soft news and summarizes the similarities and differences of them. Theirsimilarities are as follows: First, they have the same range of content. Both contentsreported in the soft news include comments, columns, figures, travel logs, anecdotes,and human interest stories. Second, soft news of both languages bears various writingforms, which are not limited to the conventional writing styles of hard news like theinverted pyramid form, suspended-interest form, chronological form, and thecomprehensive form. Lastly, the most similar and significant common feature ofChinese and English soft news lies in its functions: the informative function. Chinese soft news and English soft news are different in two aspects: the arrangement of theorder of information, and the style of the language.In translation Chinese soft news into English, two levels of adaptation should berealized: the communicative level and the linguistic level. In adaptation at thecommunicative level, the mental world, the social world, and the physical worldshould be taken into consideration, in which cognitive and emotive elements shouldbe considered to realize the adaptation in the mental world, cultural backgrounds andreligious beliefs should be referred to realize the adaptation in the social world andtime and place should be paid attention to in the physical world. As for the linguisticlevel, the translator should try to adapt their translation in four aspects: the lexicallevel, the sentential level, the discoursal level and the stylistic level. When these twocategories of adaptation are achieved, the translated version of the Chinese soft newsis expected to achieve its informative function.Translation is a process of dynamic adaptation, therefore the C-E soft newstranslation should not only adapt in the linguistic structures but also thecommunicative context. Only when the translators seriously experience, analyze andcomprehend the source texts can they achieve the dynamic adaptation in thetranslation process and transmit the cultural information in the source text so as toachieve the equivalent transference between the source texts and the target texts.