English And Chinese Writing Styles Of News Leads: A Linguistic And Cultural Analysis

News is closely related to society and culture. It reflects social and cultural peculiarities and also has its impacts on society and culture. News writing has unique features due to the nature of news, that is, timeliness, accuracy and conciseness. As a means of communication, news, when involving in cross-cultural communication, may bring about a stronger culture shock. It becomes a nice mirror of cultural peculiarities. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study between English and Chinese news leads and thus make an analysis of the differences in thought patterns, values, etc. between the two cultures. Based on this, some suggestions are made for lead translation between English and Chinese.Chapter One makes a comparative study between Chinese and English leads in linguistic characteristics by comparing their structure and specific writing. As the essence of a news article, the lead should make the best effect with the fewest words summarizing in just a few sentences the most important elements of the story it covers. To meet the requirement, English and Chinese news writers compose news leads in different ways. The comparison is made in four aspects: 1) structure: inverted pyramid format of English leads vs. details enumeration before the key point of Chinese leads; 2) prominence of key points in English leads vs. enumeration of minor details in Chinese leads; 3) specific and accurate diction in English leads vs. general and vague statements in Chinese leads; 4) easy words in English leads vs. special terms in Chinese leads. The latter three points are in fact under the same point: specific writing of the lead.Chapter Two tries to find out the source of the differences in writing style between English and Chinese leads in the perspective of culture. In this chapter, a cultural analysis is made by comparing cultural peculiarities like thought patterns and values between English and Chinese cultures based on the linguistic comparison in the previous chapter. The analysis is divided into four parts. The first three parts arefocused on thought patterns and the last on values. The first part explains the structural difference between English and Chinese leads with a comparison of western logical & linear thought and Chinese rambling & spiral thought. The second and the third parts are focused on the difference between the specific and accurate diction in English leads and the general and vague statements in Chinese leads. The comparative study of thought patterns includes two aspects: objective vs. subjective and accurate vs. fuzzy. The objective vs. subjective comparison is also used to explain the different selection of elements in English and Chinese leads in the second part. The last part ascribes the different wording styles of English and Chinese leads, namely, easy words in English and special terms in Chinese, to the different values of journalism between the two cultures, i.e. commercialization vs. politics-orientation.Chapter Three makes some suggestions for lead translation between English and Chinese based on the previous discussions to tackle the obstacle of cultural differences. With the help of Nida's dynamic equivalence theory, three strategies are suggested to deal with differences in writing style in lead translation, namely 1) adding or cutting down; 2) restructuring; 3) rewriting.