C-E Translation Of Economic News From Skopos Theory Perspective

As a way of cross-culture communication, news translation, allows insightsoriginal from China to be introduced to the global stage and opens windows for theworld to witness China’s rapid economic growth. More importantly, the era ofglobalization has seen the international society’s increasing demand towardinformation about China’s emerging economy. Therefore, how to translate news aboutChina’s economic trends to the world in a better way is worthy of research. Althoughvarious studies have been done on news translation, studies especially focused on theC-E translation of economic news are still insufficient. Seen from the theoreticalperspective, the skopos theory, put forward by German translation scholar HansVermeer, different from the traditional theory of equivalence, offers the theoreticalfoundation for the enrollment of flexible strategies in translation.This thesis, therefore, is focused on the C-E translation of economic news fromthe perspective of the skopos theory.Through the analysis of economic news extracted from authoritative news media,such as China News Service, The Washington Post, etc., the thesis discusses thefeatures of economic news and the disparities between Chinese and English economicnews. Then, the thesis summarizes a feasible translation procedure for the C-Etranslation of economic news, namely: analyzing the intratextual and extratextualfactors of the source text, specifying the translation brief, selecting strategies to editand translate and revising the translated text. Finally, the thesis discusses four majortranslation strategies, namely omission, addition, reconstruction and rewriting, in theC-E edition-translation of economic news by conducting an in-depth analysis on newsexamples taken from China’s authoritative multilingual news media, such as XinhuaNet (English Version).The thesis draws the following conclusion: instead of pursuing a verbatimequivalence, the translation of economic news should focus on achieving the targettext’s intended function. Therefore, flexible translation strategies should be adopted inthe C-E translation of economic news and edition-translation is the preferred approach to improve the target text’s readability. During the course ofedition-translation, a good command of the text type and text features of economicnews is the premise to a better comprehension of the source text. Meanwhile, theawareness of the disparities between Chinese and English economic news isindispensable in catering to the needs of the target readership. Finally, translationstrategies, such as omission, addition, reconstruction and rewriting, should integrateas a whole to produce a target text with optimized readability.