On The Translation Of Vocative News And Strategies From The Perspective Of Text Typology

In recent years, most studies consider the informative function of news as the main objective of study. Their researches mainly focus on the objectivity of news, but the subjectivity of news is still insufficiently studied. Vocative news attempts to cause certain emotional responses from the readers. The translation of vocative news should take guiding, persuading and influencing audiences as its responsibility. Therefore, in order to prompt the target readers to take the same reactions as the original news readers, the translation of vocative news needs to be conformed to expressive conventions and aesthetics of the target readers.In the 1960’s, Katharina Reiss, a German scholar and translator of western translation school, proposed Text Type Theory on the basis of Karl Buhler’s model of language functions. Later, the British translator Peter Newmark further developed this theory. Newmark divided language functions into three parts which were applied to translation. Both studies are considered as Text Type Theory. Therefore, under the guidance of Text Type Theory, to study vocative news and its translation strategy is feasible. Vocative news is classified into three categories by author in this article: entertainment news, catastrophic news and typical report. These three types of news have common features: firstly, they are equipped with vocative function, which is also the chief feature; then, vocative news should be readable and brief; next, the vocative-news text is featured by strong subjectivity, but the author tries to hide himself in order that the readers can make anticipated responses naturally; finally, the form of vocativenews is relatively flexible. It is less formal with respect to the formative text, but is more flexible than the expressive text. According to their classifications and characteristics, this thesis analyzes the application of Text Typology to vocative news translation with examples. At the lexical level, the translation of vocative news often uses adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns and phrases with emotional colors; at the grammatical level, it always uses simple present tense and passive voice; at the rhetoric level, simile and personification techniques are often adopted in the translation of vocative news. These techniques will greatly reflect emotional functions on news texts.In this article, Chapter One is devoted to introducing the significance of vocative news and its research methodology; Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature done in the field of News Translation studies, including both in China and abroad; Chapter Three is to establish the main theoretical framework for the whole thesis. It introduces four parts, including the early views of Text Types Classification, Karl Buhler’s Model of Language Functions, Reiss’ s Text Typology Theory and Newmark’s Text Types and Text Functions; Chapter Four is devoted to introducing news and news translation, which includes four parts, definitions of news, news values, news translation and its features; Chapter Five and Chapter Six serve as the main body of this thesis. In Chapter Five, it mainly introduces three categories and four features of vocative news, and studies its linguistic characteristics at the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical levels. Chapter Six is to explore main translation strategies for vocative news text, including literal translation, liberal translation and flexible translation. And flexible method is divided into three categories: reconstruction, adjustment of reporting angles and four-character expression. At the lexical level, the extensive use of Chinese idioms and contagious vocabularies, such as compassion, fear, hope, thinking, etc, can make readers respond instantly and resonate emotionally. At the syntactic level, inverted and exclamatory sentences are often applied to vocative news translation. At the structural level, employing the reconstruction and flashback approaches is to highlight the theme. Chapter seven mainly generalizes the whole thesis and proposes several suggestions for further study. Therefore, this article studies vocative news translation and strategies from the perspective of Text Type Theory, which plays a great role in guiding the fields of news, linguistics, and translation teaching and practice.