Exploring E-C Translation Strategies Of Soft News Based On The Translation Variation Theory

Being in the era of information,people are quite familiar with news in their daily life due to its function of conveying information.Soft news,bringing the humanity,knowledge and enjoyment together,is a special kind of news laying less emphasis on timeliness.While it embraces comprehensive themes,intriguing content,flexible words choices and expressions,and wide range of audience,it poses a challenge to translators.This paper,binding the Translation Variation Theory put forward by the professor Huang Zhonglian with the author’s internship of E-C translation in the China Daily’s iNews website,intends to explore the E-C translation strategies of soft news.Within the analysis framework of seven variation devices in the fore-mentioned theory,namely supplement,deletion,conflation,paraphrase,edition,compression,and rewriting,this research attempts to analyze the application of the above-mentioned devices in translation practice.Moreover,by comparing the initial translated version and varied one,this paper examines both the efficacy of the variation devices in practice and the acceptance of the varied translation among the target readers.The findings are as follow:1)only four kinds of devices,that is,addition,deletion,paraphrase and conflation are adopted in the E-C translation of soft news in author’s internship for China Daily’s iNews website.For each proportion,the device of paraphrase ranks the first,addition second,and then deletion and conflation,and the rest are left;2)the device of addition and deletion are commonly adopted in rendering headline,and addition,deletion,paraphrase and conflation in the news body part;3)the varied version of soft news are generally accepted by target audience for effectively conveying information,while there exists the failure of variation due to the misuse of four-character phrase and mis-rendering of culture-loaded message.Based on the Translation Variation Theory,the E-C translation strategy research of soft news can shed some light on news translation.It may help translators effectively provide Chinese people with the translated news with high-quality.Thus,not only the world is better known to China,but her own voice can be heard clearer in the world.