Translator’s Role In Political News Transediting

In this world of globalization featuring rapid flow of products and information across borders, news translation is playing a critical role in facilitating the cross-cultural exchange of information. As nations around the world become more interdependent, the global political events are at the center of the world’s attention and reported by almost all the media. As ordinary readers or audience, we take the translated news as the source. But who is translating the news and how they translate are invisible to us.News translation is carried out by multilingual media professionals, in a process combining editing and translation. The media professionals play the role of translator at linguistic level and social role as an editor or journalist. This study examines the dual role of the news translators and their devotion to each role. Further, within the framework of rewriting theory, this study tries to find out what specific transediting strategies the news translators employ, why they use these strategies and whether there is an "invisible hand" behind this.A survey, targeting news translators in four Chinese official media, is conducted to get inside information of the translators’ role. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the transediting strategies and the manipulation behind it, exemplified by the Cankao Xiaoxi translation of reports on the disclosure of the U.S. SPRISM project.Based on the survey and analysis of the news translated by Cankao Xiaoxi, this study concludes that news translators play a dual role as translator and media professional. The social role as a journalist or editor decides the selection of news and choice of translation strategies, including deletion, addition, restructuring and condensation. There is no faithful translation in the Cankao Xiaoxi; the media and ideology can manipulate the translation process.