| With the growth of China’s comprehensive national strength and international status, Chinese language and culture are in an unprecedented popular in the world. The expressions for Chinese current affairs are produced in the China’s unique political, economic and cultural context. Chinese media plays an important role in translating the expressions into English. At the same time, the US media also translate the expression, but in their own way, which conditioned by its own ideology is likely to make a partial or biased value judgment with the Chinese culture and situation.Different translation theories have been applied to research on the translations of the expressions for Chinese current affairs. However, few contrastive studies have been made of the same subject via application of the German functionalist translation theory. In view of the vacancy of this aspect, the author of this thesis, attempts to apply German functionalist translation theory to the contrastive analysis of two most influential news media in China and the US, to bring light to the reasons why the same expressions have different translations. The thesis uses three branches of the functionalist translation theory as the special perspectives of the thesis, Katharina Reiss" Text Typology, Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopos Theory and Justa Holz-Manttari’s Translational Action Theory.The conclusion shows that the reader-oriented translation factor, ideological differences between Chinese and American news media, the differences of the text type and skopos of the translators, and differences between source language and target language in cultural and political system are the four reasons why the same expression has different translation versions. Studies have also shown that functionalist approach is significant in guiding the contrastive research. |
