Analyzing Political News Translation From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

The progression of globalization leads to the closely connection among countries. Economic interaction, cultural interaction and information interaction have been intensified. As a part of information interaction, news communication plays an important role; and of all these categories of news communication, the political news occupies the most important position. Political news aims to spread political news and report political affairs with simple language. Reporting facts happening recently in a country or among countries, it presents guidelines, policies adopted by political parties, social groups and social powers while they are dealing with national life and international relations. Political news possesses political characteristics, which means that political news will be influenced or manipulated by politics and political ideology. As each country has its own political views, political standpoint and political ideology, political news of each country will also be different. Comparing to other varieties of news, political news not only serves to transmit information, but also serves to spread ideas and ideology, serves to build image of government, to affect people’s political view and political attitude so as to direct people’s political behavior. Because of its political characteristics and its functions, the translation of political news demands translators to have a good grasp of the Party’s policies. When translate political news, factors such as national culture, national interest, national ideology and Party’s policies etc. should be taken into consideration. That how to overcome influence brought by these factors and spread thoughts, culture and ideology correctly to the public would be the emphasis of this thesis.Traditional translation researches considered news translation as a language phenomenon which is just a transmission between two languages, and the emphasis of the researches was put on the linguistic level. Some of these researches study news translation from the perspective of functionalism, and some from the perspective of communication, and some from the perspective of intertextuality theory. All these theories don’t study news translation from the perspective of political characteristics of news. Translation of political news can’t do without politics, the culture, policies and guidelines, political ideology of a country would affect its translation. So researches of political news translation should not only cover the linguistic level, but also the non-linguistic level. Lefevere thinks over translation from the perspective of culture and proposes rewriting theory which explains that translation is the production of society and culture and it is constrained by ideology, poetics and patronage. Analyzing political news translation from the perspective of rewriting theory could explain better the characteristics of political news translation. This thesis studies political news translation from the angles of ideology, poetics and patronage with a number of examples. It is found that political news translation can’t do without the influence of political ideology, news agencies, patronage, etc. So translating political news should not only take the influence of linguistic factors into consideration, but also that of ideology, poetics and patronage.