The Cross-cultural Meditation On Journalistic Translation

The past two decades witnessed the full flourish in China's comprehensive construction as well as her communication with the other nations in the world. The communication or exchange with the rest of the world highlights the importance of journalistic translation which actually acts as a tool that can balance various cultural and informational asymmetries. And journalistic translation thus comes to be an emerging area in the study of translation.The author defines journalistic translation as a kind of cross-cultural communication activity by testing the qualities of journalistic translation against the theories of the study of culture and cross-cultural communication.Therefore, cultural gaps caused by the discrepancies between different cultures still pose as one of the serious obstacles in the way to successful translation of news stories as they do during the other cross-cultural communication activities. After a thorough analysis of the stylistic features of journalistic writing and cultural factors reflected in the news stories, the author attempts to list exclusively the cultural obstacles in journalistic translation, based on which he believes that some of the general methods still work in the translation of cultural factors in news stories, especial in the lexical and syntactical levels. But problems happen when translators have to confront with the problems of the text level and ideological discrepancies, such as ethnocentrism, in the news report. The author further offers two practical translation method—editing and readership oriented adapting. These two methods, commonly used in journalistic writing, sparkle in this thesis.