| Soft news refers to those lively news that has strong human feelings and can easily arouse audience's interest to read, listen or see such as society news, sports news, tidbit and so on. Since China's reform and opening up, communication between China and the world become more and more extensive. In this situation, on the one hand, we need to project the facts, trends and views of socialist China and Chinese to the outside. On the other hand, the world also hopes to know more about China, a great country which boasts a long history of more than 5000 years. Thus, because of the special characteristics of soft news, it plays a more and more important role in the communication between China and the outside. It has become the window through which the world would know China. Therefore, it is pretty meaningful to study its English translation. However, only a few scholars notice this theme of soft news. So the theme of soft news is a creative aspect of this paper.This theme is discussed on the basis of functionalist approaches. It is the other creative aspect, because only a few scholars discuss this theme from this perspective. Functionalist approaches from Germany appear in the 1970s and 1980s when the theory of equivalence is very popular and translation studies are still within the scope of linguistics. However, functionalist approaches cast off the fetters of linguistics and hold that the problem cannot be solved only with linguistics. Thus, this kind of theories offers a new perspective to translation studies. It regards translation as an intentional communicative action, which breaks the tradition that regards the text as the center. And it also makes translator show more concern for the target reader, the target text, the social effect and communicative function of the target text. In this paper, based on functionalist approaches the author will explore the best way to translate soft news into English with examples taken from both the Chinese and English editions of some newspapers and magazines in order to improve the quality of English translation of soft news and then do something useful for the communication between China and the world.This paper begins with an introduction. This part states the significance of functionalist approaches and soft news, which is also the reason why the author writes this paper. And then the author analyzes the present situation of the study on soft news translation and points out the value of this paper and the study method. This paper consists of four chapters:Chapter One introduces the main contents of functionalist approaches and comments on this kind of theories. Through the discussion of the representatives of functionalist approaches and their theories, this chapter lays a theoretical foundation for the rest of this paper.Chapter Two discusses the characteristics of soft news as the factors needed to consider in its English translation and then its advantages to prove that soft news is worth to be studied and at the same time shows the value of this paper in the English translation practice of soft news and the communication between China and the world.Chapter Three analyzes the difficulty in soft news translation and characteristics of the English translation of soft news. And then proves applicability of functionalist approaches to soft news translation in the following aspects: the intentionality of translator, the acceptability of target text and culture-specificity. At last, the author puts forward the translation method--adaptation.Chapter Four explores three modes of adaptation (expansion, omission and creation) with examples selected from China Today and Beijing Review.The final part of this paper is a conclusion. It summarizes the whole paper and points out its two creative aspects and also its shortcomings. |
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