A Study Of The Translation Of E-C Soft News From The Perspective Of Translation Variation Theory

Along with the development of globalization, international news has played a more and more important role in facilitating Sino-foreign communication. According to the nature of news, news can be divided into hard news and soft news. What hard news mainly reports are serious and significant events, usually related to politics,economics or devastating natural disaster and so on. Soft news refers to the news with strong human interest, written in a flexible and vivid style and that can arouse the reading interest easily. It includes social news, cultural news, sports news,entertainment news and so on. Soft news does not stick to rigid text form, but lays stress on touching readers from emotional aspect, hence new methods different from traditionally complete and faithful translation should be adopted. In fact, the practice of variation is nothing new in soft news translation, but until the emergence of Huang Zhonglian's translation variation theory few systematic studies have been made of this phenomenon.Professor Huang put forward translation variation theory in 1990s. He points out that translation variation is the translation activity aimed at deriving the content of original work by using variation strategies such as addition, deletion, edition,paraphrase, compression, combination and adaption under specific conditions to fulfill the special needs of target readers. Translation variation theory stresses the subjectivity of translator and the demands of readers. The effects and values that soft news is intended to achieve can be realized by variation strategies. Translation variation theory provides complete theoretical framework for the variation phenomena in soft news translation.By starting from the perspective of translation variation theory, this thesis studies the application of methods of translation variation in E-C soft news translation. The author selects some English soft news from Cable News Network, Daily Mail, and The Mirror and then compares the English news with its Chinese version and make analysis. Selective translation, edited translation and narrative translation are the three variation methods often employed in E-C soft news translation. These three methods deal with the original text in different ways but all produce better expressive effect and fulfill the special needs of E-C soft news readers. To put translation variation theory into soft news translation can enrich the application scope of translation variation theory, and provide available translation methods and theoretical basis for E-C soft news translation.