Translation Report On Editorials From The New York Times

In an era of information, everyone spends a lot of time searching the internet to have abroad view of big events all over the world. Therefore, news is playing a growing significantrole in information spreading. Among different news types, editorial is a very important partwith its informational and commentary features. What’s more, editorial also has the function ofleading the public opinion. Therefore the famous American newspaper editor Joseph Pulitzerregarded editorial as the heart of newspaper. People can not only know what is happening butalso different opinions or attitudes toward the same event. As editorial is within the reach of alarge population, it is of great importance to translate editorials.This report is based on the translation practice of editorials from the New York Times. Inthe translation project about150articles are collected from the editorial page in the originalEnglish version of the New York Times on the official website(http://www.nytimes.com), thelength of each article is about600--1000words, altogether about100,000words. Editorial notonly reports the news, but also reflects editors’opinions, attitudes and evaluations towards thenews events. Halliday thinks that translators should reproduce the register features in theprocess of translation so as to achieve register equivalence in field, tenor and mode. Therefore,translators should pay attention to the features of editorials, convey the information accuratelyand reproduce the register features of editorials in the translation. With the guidance ofregister theory, the author made a detailed analysis of editorial translation from vocabulary,sentence, title, quotation and discourse and put forward translation skills respectively.Through the case analysis, this report draws the following conclusion: the register analysis ofsource text can not only help the translator choose the proper translation methods so as toeffectively reproduce the register features of source text in translation to achieve register equivalence. Besides, the analysis of register features is also an effective way to check thetranslation. Field has an effect on the choice of lexis, phrase, grammar and sentence structure.So for the translation of words and sentences, the translator needs to pay more attention to thefield feature. While for the translation of quotation, the translator needs to take theparticipants’ role and status into consideration and present the editor’s intension in thetranslation. However, sometimes it is not enough to just discuss one aspect. The threevariables, namely field, tenor and mode are closely connected with each other. Therefore, thetranslator should try to take all the aspects into consideration in the process of translation.