C-C Soft News Translation:a Functionalist Perspective

Soft news, more an entertainment genre, without so many policy components, is typically sensational, more personality-centered and entertainment-oriented, such as social news and sports news. With the increasing intercultural and technological communication, soft news, which provides information about development, investment environment, history, culture and beautiful scenic spots of China, has become a window through which the world learn and understand China. The emerging popularity of soft news and its particular language styles and functions call for more and more attention in soft news translation. Little research in this respect has been conducted so far, this thesis attempts to arouse more attention to soft news translation studies.Soft news translation differs from the equivalence-based translation practice in that it centers on the target audience. It involves a specialized adaptation process depending on factors of the target culture. Functionalist theory provides a good theoretical framework to study soft news translation as functionalist takes the receptor as the center of translation.This thesis focuses on soft news translation from Chinese to English by comparing and analyzing the Chinese and English texts from China Today of2008from the functionalist perspective. The author tries to explore a way to bridge the gap between the translation practice of soft news from and the long established equivalence-based translation criteria. And the combination of theory and practice is embodied in three aspects:translation brief, source-text analysis and text-typology. From all this, it can be concluded that translators would tend to choose "expansion","deletion" and "reformulation" as their translation strategies, these "adaptation" phenomenon show the applications that functionalist has in soft news translation. Adaptation is an efficacious and essential supplement to those traditional translation strategies, and it is a necessary method to achieve the goal of effective communication. The communicative function determines that flexible strategies should be taken in the translation process, and the "maximum information" should be passed to target audience.