A Study On English Translation Of Current News In Newspapers And Journals Under Functionalist Translation Theory

Current News in newspapers and journals refers to the information that is published in newspapers and journals about recent events in a particular area or country, including news about national economy and people's livelihood, social construction, culture and education, etc.. With the rapid development of science and technology, intercultural communication becomes an important national event in our country. On the one hand, China needs to introduce the actual situation of their own history, culture, and people's daily life to the world, and show the great achievements of the socialist construction. On the other hand, the world is eager to learn more about China, a country with five thousand years of history, so as to purse development and cooperation. Therefore, Current News in newspapers and journals with its own unique advantages plays a more and more important role in the international exchanges. It has become the window through which the world knows about China. In this case, the study of the English translation of Current News in newspapers and journals becomes very significant.Functionalist Translation Theory emerged in Germany in 1970 s. It is a systematical theory which mainly includes Katharina Reiss' s Text Typology, Hans Vermeer's Skopostheorie, Justa Holz-Manttari's Theory of Translation Action, and Christiane Nord's Theory of Function plus Loyalty and so on. According to Functionalist Translation Theory, any translation must have a purpose or achieve a certain function. Whether target text is faithful to source text is determined by the purpose of translation and the deep understanding of the differences between target text and source text in language and culture. Therefore, in the process of translation, translators should transform the symbols that have specific meanings in source text culture into language symbols in target language culture so as to achieve the ultimate purpose. With these unique and advanced ideas, Functionalist Translation Theory has extended the study scope of translation theory and offered more implications to translation, especially Current News translation. This thesis, based on the practical translation, tries to apply Functionalist Translation Theory to the English translation of Current News in newspapers and journals to explore some English translation principles and effective strategies from the perspective of lexicon, syntax and text by means of deeply analyzing the types and characteristics of Current News in newspapers and journals with the aim to give some inspiration and guidance to Current News translation practices.The thesis mainly contains six parts. The first part mainly introduces the research background, purposes and significance, as well as the organization of this thesis. The second part gives literature reviews to the previous studies of scholars at home and abroad in the fields of translation of Current News in newspapers and journals and Functionalist Translation Theory. The third part interprets the origin, development of the Functionalist Translation Theory and focuses on two theoretical concepts--Text Typology and Skopostheorie. The fourth part makes a deeply analysis on characteristics of Current News in newspapers and journals in terms of function and text. The fifth part digs out three principles, that is, fidelity principle, conciseness principle and compliance principle. Based on three principles, several strategies from the perspective of lexicon, syntax and text are explored, that is, literal translation, interpretive translation, abridgment, transformation, reorganization and simplification. The sixth part summarized the major finds, limitations and prospects for future studies.