Editing Translation In Home News Reporting For Overseas Readers: A Functionalist Approach

With China's rise in recent years, it has attracted worldwide attention and is willing to build its image as a responsible power on the world stage. Home news reporting for overseas readers serves as a channel to make China's voice heard at the official level which is extremely necessary since China's rise is attracting worldwide attention, and also provides information about China to ordinary people which is supposed to facilitate cultural exchanges and friendships among peoples. With these functions in mind and given the differences between English and Chinese cultures, home news reporting for overseas readers should be different from translation of domestic news, but an editing translation process in light of functionalist approach and Skopos.Functionalism and the Skopos theory based on functionalism have provided a new and more applicable perspective to translation since its formation in 1970s. Instead of seeing translation as a static process seeking one-to-one equivalence as in the structural translation theory, functionalism and Skopos allow the translator the right to choose translation strategies according to the purpose of translation and cultural and language differences.This M.A. thesis is an attempt to apply functionalist approach to editing translation in home news reporting for overseas readers. It proposed three strategies of editing translation through analysis of examples. Due to the limit of time and experience, the number of examples is limited and the analysis is not detailed enough. In order to cope with new situations, more techniques of editing translation are called for.