Transediting In E-C News Translation

This paper mainly deals with transediting in E-C news translation, designed to address three research questions: 1) What do we understand by news translation and transediting in it? 2) What are the major transediting techniques used in E-C news translation? 3) What are the reasons for transediting in news translation (e.g. can we explain it from the perspective of gatekeeping theory since news is the primary medium genre in mass communication)? News in this paper refers to just one type of news — the international agency hard news story as published in the press.This paper first clarifies that transediting is one of the methods of doing news translation and should not be substituted for news translation as a whole. Based on sample analysis, this paper then analyzes methods and techniques employed in transediting single-sourced and double-sourced news, in terms of the lead, the body copy, and the headline respectively. The paper further digs into the reasons for the existence and popular practice of transediting in news translation in the perspective of "gatekeeping " theory in mass communication studies. This paper then points out that transediting of news is not an isolated text-transformational process and it is governed by many "gate-keepers" along its route. News transediting is also affected by various situational factors such as organizational policy, social obligations, nature of the target reader, and news values, etc.Drawing on previous research findings of other scholars, this paper bears its own individuality in the self-collected corpus of sample news from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reference News ( 《参考消息》). Another distinctive feature is the paragraph distribution pattern analysis that serves to illuminate the methods adopted in transediting the body copy of a news story. Quantitative analysis is also conducted to illustrate relevant conclusions in this paper.