A Translation Report On News Media Translation (Chapter Three)

This is a report on the translation of “Approaches to News Media Translation”,the third chapter from the book News Media Translation by Federico Zanettin.The source text provides a general overview of current research in news media translation,illustrating the three main perspectives of news media translation studies,namely process research,product research,and cultural orientation research.Translation of this source text can help general readers know how news is produced,disseminated,and interpreted.Meanwhile,the news media translation methods proposed in the source text can inspire news translators.This translation report aims to help novice translators improve translation quality from a methodological perspective.The translator adopts Nida’s functional equivalence theory which advocates two principles: accuracy and reader-orientation.The former refers to the idea that the translator shall convey the original meaning precisely and the latter means that target readers and original readers should have the same response to the texts.Meanwhile,the translation shall meet the reading habits and expectation of target readers.Due to the informational nature of the source text,the translator’s efforts should be on accurate conveyance of the original information while respecting the reader’s feelings,which precisely corresponds to the principles of functional equivalence theory.For this reason,functional equivalence theory serves well as a theoretical guide for this translation project.In order to solve the problems encountered in translation practice at the lexical and syntactic levels,the translator uses the following translation methods in the light of functional equivalence theory.Literal translation and paraphrase(including annotation and extension of word meaning)are adopted to address the difficulties in translating terms at the lexical level,so as to reproduce the professional and academic writing style of the source text.At the sentential level,the translator applies logic explicitation,sentence division and voice conversion to the realization of the strict logicality in the Chinese version.In so-doing,the target text reader and the source text reader can enjoy the same reading experience in both content and form to the greatest extent.