| Translation variation has been widely applied to various fields, such as advertising translation, newspapers compilation, literature translation writing and so on. In the 1990 s, Huang Zhonglian put forward translation variation theory. According to his opinion, translation variation is an activity of deriving relevant contents of the original by using appropriate translation methods like addition, deletion, edition, reporting, condensing, combination and rewriting, so as to satisfy the demands of target readers. The theory puts emphasis on translators and target readers. Reader‘s attitude is one of the crucial factors in translation process. Also, the theory provides a complete theoretical framework and foundation for translation variation. It expands the scope and pattern of domestic translation theories.News, as an important information media, has specific structure and linguistic features. It is different from a lot of literary works. Soft news, also known as ―human-interest news‖, refers to news with highly emotional factors and light-hearted styles which appeal to readers and is rewarded immediately. The types of soft news mainly include entertainment news, scientific news, sports news and so on. Comparing with hard news, soft news is likely to get emotional resonance among readers. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt unconventional translation methods like equivalent translation in soft news translation. It is of great significance to carry out in-depth study on E-C soft news translation.Although there are many studies on news translation, most domestic scholars studied news translation mainly based on western theories. This research selected several pieces of English soft news from Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, as well as corresponding Chinese versions from China Daily, Xin Huanet and The Global Times. Then, the thesis compared these soft news stories with the translated versions and explored some available translation methods from the perspective of translation variation theory. Descriptive method was utilized in this research. Finally, the study found that if the length of soft news is too long, methods of translation variation are commonly used. However, not all the methods of translation variation are available in soft news translation. The most common translation methods include selective translation(deleting words from sentences, selecting sentences from paragraphs, selecting paragraphs from chapters), editing and translation(intro-paragraphic, intro-chapter, extra-chapter). The application of these methods highlights translator‘s subjectivity, as well as satisfying the needs of target readers. Moreover, the study provided a theoretical foundation and available translation methods for E-C soft news translation, and developed application range of translation variation theory. |
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