A Study On News Lead Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the fast development of economic globalization and information network technology, the whole world has gradually turned into a global village. Every day, every hour, even every minute, our life is flooded with various news from everywhere of the world. Through news, we have the opportunities to know what has happened and what is happening in the world. That is the reason why news exchange is so important and necessary to the political, economic and cultural communication between China and the outside of the world. On one hand, we have to show the real China to the outside world in order to let those foreigners eliminate their misunderstandings about us. On the other hand, we need to get the facts of the events happening beyond our borders, which may have great impacts on our life. Based on this kind of necessity and requirement, news translation becomes more and more significant to the cultural exchange and mutual understanding between China and the outside world.As the most important part in a piece of news, news lead tells the readers the basic facts of the news and at the same time has the function of attracting people to read over the whole news. Therefore, news lead translation is quite significant to news translation. However, the study on news leads translation is still at the elementary step, almost focusing on the case study and lacking basic theory analysis. This thesis tries to explore the translation strategies based on linguistic theories to optimize news lead translation.Relevance theory, which is a branch of pragmatics, focuses on human cognition and communication. It was formally proposed by French linguist and philosopher Dan Sperber and British linguist Deirdre Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. Because the key function of news is to achieve information exchange, so the major function of news lead translation is to realize fast and accurate information communication, involving two different languages. This thesis aims to explore the news lead translation phenomenon in a wide range through studying news lead translation phenomenon based on relevance theory.