On News Transediting From The Perspective Of The Translator’s Subjectivity

Nowadays, news is an important channel for transmission of information. But confronted with information explosion, people tend to be more purposeful than before. Full translation of texts cannot meet people’s need. Some original texts may have redundant messages and logical problems, and thus translators have to process those texts by usingtransediting methods like combining, abridging and adjusting. It is obvious that newstransediting is necessary and relevant research is also meaningful.News can be classified into online news and offline news. In order to deliver foreign (native) online/offline news to native (foreign) readers in time, transediting serves as an essential means. Transediting combines, editing and translating. It is a process begun with editing and followed by translating, and is a reconstruction rather than sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph translation. The forms of transediting vary, ranging from textual addition, information deletion to structure adjustment. Such flexibility endows the target text with a clearer theme, a more lucid logic and a more explicit purpose than the original text.Duringtransediting, the translator should give full play to his/her subjectivity. Subjectivity includes autonomy, self-behaving, selectivity and creativity. In news transediting, the translator’s subjectivity is reflected in strategy selection, contents combination, information abstraction and inadequacy remedying. The translator’s subjectivity shows his/her cultural consciousness, reader awareness and personal preference to some extent.On the other hand, the translator’s subjectivityis also affected by outside surroundings, such as political economic environment, cultural atmosphere and translation requirements.The thesis studies the application of the translator’s subjectivity in news transediting from macro level and micro level. If transedition is related with the theme and the whole structure of the text, the subjectivity belongs to the macro level; if transedition is related with specific details, the subjectivity belongs to the micro level.Macro-level subjectivity involves headline adaptation, text restructuring, thematic shift and information combination. Headline adaptation means that the translator abandons the original headline and gives full play to his/her creativity to make a new one, highlighting the theme of the target text. Text restructuring signifies that the translator flexibly changes the position of the original paragraphs and sentences to adjust the text structure, making it suitable for target readers’ reading habits. Thematic shift means that the translator uses his/her abstraction ability to extract information relevant with the theme of the target text, presenting a new theme. Information combination implies that the translator integrates several reports to enrich the target text. Micro-level subjectivity engages message slimming and oversight improvement. Message slimming is that the translator deletes redundant messages to make the target text more condensed to be propagated. Oversight improvement means that the translator properly modifies the original text based on his/her judgment to improve the accuracy of the target text, ensuring its reliability. From the above, we can see that on both macro level and micro level, the translator’s subjectivity is fully displayed in news transediting. However, undue subjectivity will result in theme deviation or message inaccuracy of the target text, which is irreconcilable with the purpose of transediting. Thus, translators should improve their language competence and keep learning in order to properly make use of their subjectivity in news transediting.