C-E News Translation In New Media

Hand-held devices like mobile phones have been increasingly indispensable to our information access, while the mobile newspaper, a representative communication form of the fifth generation media emerging after newspapers, broadcast, TV, and the Internet, is inborn with the incomparable advantages over traditional media. It can be estimated that the mobile phone media will surely become an important field of China’s external communication. In this way, the research on the Chinese-English news translation in mobile phone newspapers is of significance for better exploiting this field.Mobile phones, as the fifth generation of media, have unique features in communication, while the translation of mobile phone news is the application of the traditional translation activity on the new media. Due to this, the translation activity must be confined and governed by traditional translation theories and principles, as well as bear its unique features. The research on the requirements of new media toward translation will promote the realization of translation purposes in new media. The detailed research on the translation strategies of ChinaDaily Mobile Newspaper, one of the authoritative English mobile newspapers in China, will surely benefit the translation in new media. This research, thus aims to find how to handle the limits on C/E news translation in new media through the case study on ChinaDaily Mobile Newspaper, hoping to achieve better communication and realize the purposes of external communication.It is found in the research the limited displaying capacity of each line on the mobile phone screens constitutes an outstanding limit on C/E translation of news headlines. To deal with this, translators have adopted a series of measures, including but not limited to, reducing the using of punctuations, adopting acronyms or abbreviations, highlighting those with maximum news value, and cutting down information points to ensure the length of English news headlines to be displayed in one single line on the mobile phone screen. As for the lead, translators tap the inflection of English into full play, and adjust properly based on the features of English news. At the same time, considering the different cognitive capacity of target readers, necessary yet concise backgrounding is added to help them understand the news lead better. In translating leads, the type of news report is also considered, for example, for translating the lead of disaster reports, such as earthquakes, landslides, traffic accidents, etc, adjustment of large scale is common to conform to the convention of English disaster reports and the expectation of target readers. In body translation, the obvious simplification is spotted in rendering words with Chinese characteristics, Chinese idioms, etc. The research also studies the unit of translation adopted, and finds out that the unit of translation in C/E translation of mobile phone news is paragraph. In addition, the research also discusses the problems in the C/E translation of mobile phone news, including silly mistakes, inconsistent expressions, mistranslation and missing translation, and improper rendering of words.Although the research is based on the translation of MMS mobile phone news, it is of instructive significance to the C/E news translation on mobile Internet websites, WAP sites, and APPs of smart phones.Owing to the insufficiency of the author in research competence, knowledge and selection of materials, there must be some errors in the research. Any critical ideas or instructive suggestions are highly appreciated.