A Functional Approach To C-E Soft News Translation

Since China’s reform and opening to the outside world, intercultural communication between China and the world becomes more and more frequent. On one side, China wants to show its socialist achievements; on the other side, the world hopes to know more about this big socialist country. Undoubtedly, publicity plays a critical role in satisfying the need. Soft news, with its special characteristics and value, is a good tool of publicity. Hence, the translation of soft news becomes important and meaningful. Good translation not only displays China’s economic, social and cultural development to the outside world, but also attracts foreign people to travel, invest, work, study or even live here. However, to our disappointment, translation of poor quality hinders intercultural exchange between China and the world and even damages China’s international image. Therefore a guiding theory is urgently needed to regulate translation and improve translation quality.In tradition, translation was regarded as a branch of applied linguistics and equivalence-based code-switching operation. The features of the source text should be preserved in the target text. However, translation is not just a process of reproducing the source text, but also an adaptation process depending on the factors of the target culture. Obviously, the traditional equivalence-based theories could not offer any help to explain this phenomenon. The German functionalist translation theory answers the call of the times. It moved away from the then prevailing equivalence-based theories, re-examines translation activities from a functionalist and communicative approach and defines translation as a purposeful activity. In order to realize the skopos of the target text, the translator could adopt techniques, like interpretation, abridgement and adaptation to carry out the translating practice. This thesis, which combines functionalist translation theory with C-E soft new translation, examines carefully how this theory guides the practice of C-E soft news translation, and proves the feasibility of the suggested techniques through abundant C-E examples.At last, it should be pointed out that all the C-E translations are taken from China Today, a specialized and authoritative magazine covering soft news about China, which guarantees the quality of all the examples.