Chinese-English Translation Of Soft News-from The Functional Approach

Nowadays,all forms of media compete to win receivers.The journalist idea is gradually replaced by market-driven one that becomes the basic idea of news selection and news writing.Pursue of receiver-maximization results in the increasing soft news and even the trend of softening of hard news.The feature of soft news enables itself to be high in news value as well as publicity value.Moreover,the frequent intercultural communication entails a good number and demand of soft news translation,thus opening a new research area and posing challenging questions for translators and translation scholars.Soft news has its own writing style:reflection of social,cultural,moral and spiritual life in content;flexible and natural in style; reader's interest as its end.Therefore,soft news translation is not just a source language(SL)-target language(TL) linguistic equivalence,but often an adaptation process depending on factors of target culture.The author firstly makes a careful review of the evolution of functional translation theory,then analyzes the essence of translational action in light of the theory of action and explains basic concepts of the approach,finally gives a detailed explanation of the core of functionalism—Skopostheorie.After detailed analysis of textual features and communicative functions of soft news,as well as its comparative analysis with hard news,the author finds that functionalism;in particular text type and Skopostheorie provide a useful tool and theoretical guidance for soft news translation."China Today" is a foreign-language magazine specialized in covering soft news of China.The great attention to China Today of our nation and the important role it plays in publicity make it possible for the author to choose it as an authentic model for textural analysis of C-E soft news translation.The author draws a tentative conclusion through textual analysis of a large number of C-E versions mainly from "China Today" and other materials that the common translation strategy of soft news is abridgement,interpretation and reformation for the reference of journalist translators.