English Translation Of Chinese Social Soft News Viewed From Skopos Theory

Making use of the bilingual social soft news from China Daily, one of an authoritative news source of China, the thesis examines the C-E translation methods of social soft news from the perspective of Skopos theory.Social soft news bears four features: wide range of subjects, close relationship with social life, the employment of a large number of new words and high readability. In the process of translating social soft news, translators should pay due attention to the differences of cultural elements and linguistic characteristics. Skopos theory has three rules: skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. It focuses above all on the aim or purpose of the translation, which determines the translation strategy and methods. Skopos theory puts target readers in a high place, which means that translators should convey the culture and language from the perspective of target readers and that target texts should conform to their cultural realization and linguistic habit. Therefore, source texts offer the information to target texts. Skopos theory can guide the translation of social soft news.The thesis details the translation brief of social soft news at the beginning:(1) The intended functions of social soft news are to convey the information and elicit the emotional resonance;(2) Target readers are those foreigners who have little or even no knowledge of Chinese culture and language;(3) Target readers choose fragile time and no certain place to read social soft news;(4) The medium include newspapers, the Internet or mobile news;(5) Their reading purpose is to gain the knowledge of Chinese society. Therefore, translators of social soft news should choose the instrumental translation strategy to achieve the translation purposes. That is to say, they can use various and flexible translation methods, which can smash the bond of the source texts. Then, the thesis elaborates that two dimensions should be highlighted in the process of translating social soft news. The first one is the cultural elements, and the second one is the linguistic characteristics. As for the cultural elements, translators can deal with them with the following three methods according to skopos rule: adding the cultural background information, replacing the cultural background information and deleting the unnecessary cultural background information. As for the linguistic characteristics, translators can deal with them with the following five methods according to coherence rule: deleting the tautology, deleting or transforming the exaggerated information, changing the sentence orders, transforming dynamic expressions into static ones and keeping the attractive expressions.The thesis draws the conclusions as follows:(1) The translation of social soft news is determined by its intended functions;(2) The cultural elements and linguistic characteristics form the predominating dimensions in the process of translating social soft news;(3) The skopos rule of Skopos theory provides the basis of dealing with cultural elements;(4) The coherence rule of Skopos theory provides the basis of dealing with linguistic characteristics. The thesis will help guide the future theoretical and practical translation of social soft news.