Content
Abstract (2)
Chapter One Profile of Journalistic English (3)
1.1 Definition of News (3)
1.2 Classification of News (3)
1.2.1 Hard News (3)
1.2.2 Soft News (4)
Chapter Two Cultural Studies and Translation (5)
2.1 Language, Culture and Translation (5)
2.2 Y an Fu?s Translation Principles (5)
Chapter Three Translation Strategies adoption (7)
3.1 The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies (7)
3.2 André Lefevere?s Theories (7)
3.3 Lawrence V enuti?s Translation Strategies (8)
Conclusion (10)
Bibliography (11)
Abstract
Translation,as one of the cross cultural activities,is not only the change of languages,but also a mode shift in cultural information. Cultural transferring adds new words and phrases to the language, thus enriches it.
With the deepening of reform and opening-up in China, the past decades have witnessed dramatic development in science and technology and the international communication has become increasingly important. Our world cannot take on such a new look without the transmission of information.
However, due to the existence of the cultural differences people have different understanding towards the same thing or the same idea, sometimes they even misunderstand them. The key point of cultural translation is whether the translator has a full cultural perspective and cultural creation so that he can make optimal options. In our tradition of translation, the host culture has been playing an important role. Therefore, it is impossible to convey the full meaning in Target Language in translating the same text in Source Language.
Journalistic language, an effective way of transmitting information, is exerting great influence on people?s everyday life and attracts constant attention. News translation, in its peculiar way, provides people with information promptly and effectively. And its great importance is self-evident. Based on a comprehensive study on the previous researches made by many experts in this field, the present thesis shoots for a fresh aspect which has been all the time neglected and is mainly devoted to the research and exploration of cultural discrepancies in the translation of journalistic English. Lawrence V enuti's translation strategies of foreignization and domestication here serve as a governing principle in the rendition of journalistic English.
The thesis introduces the definition of news, the classification of news and then outlines the news value determiner and dwells on the cultural discrepancies in the translation of journalistic English. Strategies for translation of cultural factors in journalistic English are elaborated on with examples. It is found that foreignization keeps more advantages than domestication in our current global village. Therefore,“foreignization over domestication” is suggested in the thesis. Meanwhile, the strategy of “domestication” sh ould be employed as a supplement.
Key W ords: translation, readability, cultural differences, subjectivity
Chapter One Profile of Journalistic English
1.1 Definition of News
Before we get down to examining the cultural discrepancy in news translation, it is necessary to gain more knowledge about how the term “news” is defined.
Countless scholars both at home and abroad in the field of journalism have seriously given many definitions to “news”. One of the most frequently quoted is attributed to a nineteenth-century editor John Bogart: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news.” This man-bites-dog definition, though seems to be absurd at first glance, fully illustrates one of the widely accepted news values, that is, the unusual, bizarre nature of a recently happened event.
The classical and emblematical definitions are like “News is the reporting of anything timely that has importance, use, or interest to a considerable number of persons in a publica tion audience.”, “News is a fresh report of events, facts, or opinions that people did not know before they read your story.”, “News is any event, idea or opinion that is timely, that interests or affects a large number of people in a community and that is capable of being understood by them.” etc.
Modern mass media editors would agree on the definition of news offered by Charles A. Dana, who ran the New York Sun form 1869 to 1897. He said “news is anything that interests a large part of the community and has never been brought to its attention before.”In China?s academic circles, the accepted definition is that news is the reporting of recent events. But there seems to be something important missing here. Obviously a sole word “recent” is insufficient to c larify the characteristics of news for the events on progress or in future are exclusive to the news reporting.
Therefore, Dictionary of Canadian English defines news as follows: something told as having just happened: information about something that has, just happened or will happen soon.
1.2 Classification of News
News can be classified according to different approaches and standards. When considering the transmitting tools, news can be classified into newspaper coverage, magazine coverage, radio news, TV news, cable news and dispatches. According to the districts and bounds, it can be divided into world news, home news and local news. As far as the content is concerned, there comes political news, economical news, cultural news, military news, sports news, technological news, legal news, entertainment news etc. In the light of different natures of news events, news falls into two basic categories: hard news and soft news. This classification can most reflect the essence of news.
1.2.1 Hard News
Also called pure news, spot news or straight news, hard news generally refers to up-to-the-minute news and events. It is a chronicle of currents or incidents and is the most common news style on the front page of the typical newspaper. Typical
examples are reports on crimes, fires, meetings, protest rallies, speeches and testimony in court cases and so on. Hard news emphasizes timeliness and on-the-spot report. It embodies the characteristics of journalistic English: accuracy, objectivity and neutrality, which “c oncerns occurrences potentially available to analysis or interpretation and consists of …factual representation? of occurrence deemed newsworthy” (Tuchmann, 1998:47).
1.2.2 Soft News
Opposite to hard news is “soft” news, which is not bound to immediacy.“Soft news” usually refers to feature or human-interest stories, the purpose of which is more to entertain than to inform. It?s “about things that people instinctively want to know, as opposed to things they feel duty-based to know” (Vivian, 1996:18). The u sual soft news in the newspaper comprises profiles, entertainment stories, lifestyle stories, reviews, travel stories, social news, humor, and the like. Soft news often deals with the social news with deep human touch, having the readers either cry or laugh, love or hate and envy or pity. Soft news is not considered immediately important and timely to an audience, thus, perhaps less important when compared with hard news. In most cases, it has hardly any news values.
To sum up, hard news is of great significance and usually has direct impact on people?s life while soft news generally furnishes people with knowledge, entertainment or just topics for conversation.
Chapter Two Cultural Studies and Translation
2.1 Language, Culture and Translation
Culture, a large and evasive concept, is hard to define precisely. According to Encyclopedia Britannic, there are about 160 definitions of “culture”. What?s more, new definitions are still being brought up and added up to it. The classic definition of culture was provided by Edward Burnett Taylor, the father of cultural anthropology, in his Primitive Culture: “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (E. B. Tylor, 1871:1)
Nowadays, it is universally acknowledged that language and culture are inseparable from each other. Language, as a part of culture, reflects the characteristics of culture. And the development of culture leads to the development and changes of language. Just as what Juri Lotman declares: “No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture, and no culture can exist which does not have at its center, the structure of natural language.” (cited in Bassnet: 1991:14) Bassnet asserts, “Language is the heart within the body of culture.”(ibid.) There is no hyperbole in these remarks. People communicate through languages; only by means of communication is culture shared and transmitted. Language is the carrier of culture and culture is deep rooted in language. Peter Newmark has said, “Culture is the way of life and its manifestations that peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its main means of expression.”(Newmark. 2001:35) In short, language and culture interrelate with each other to a great extent.
The relationship between language and culture can be studied in language and culture of the same nation, and can also be studied in international environment so as to find their similarities and differences. The study of the relationship between language and culture is certain to lay a foundation for the study of the relationship between culture and translation.
2.2 Y an Fu’s Translation Principles
It is well known that Y an Fu is an influential translator and enlightenment thinker of China. As an enlightening thinker of burgeoning bourgeois and translation theorist in the late Qing Dynasty, Y an Fu is renowned for his high competence in introducing the essence of western thoughts during the late 19th century, which has great influence upon the intellectual current of China. The huge impact of Y an Fu?s works is well illustrated by the reception of Huxley. The western ideas such as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” in Huxley?s book Evolution and Ethics were introduced to Chinese readers by Y an Fu as Wujing tianze (物竞天择) and Shizhe shengcun (适者生存), which has been widely-accepted as principles for the existence in the nature and frequently cited as guidelines in the ideological field of China.
According to Y an Fu, faithfulness requires that the meaning in the target
language (TL) should be as faithful to that of the original as possible. Expressiveness is the requirement of intelligibility of the target language text. Or in other words, the translated text should be in accordance with the rules of the target language. And elegance requires a translation to be esthetically pleasing in refined words.
Y an?s translation principles have been a milestone in Chinese translatio n history. It has been regarded as a general standard for any good translation. It is even considered as “the only guideline for the translator and the only criterion for the evaluation of a translation” (罗新章, 1984).
However, Many of Y an?s own translations and writings cannot be read by ordinary readers today. It is just the excessive emphasis on “elegance” that makes Y an Fu move away from his own principle of faithfulness. So from the reader?s point of view, the third point of Y an?s criteria is far from be ing ideal and perfect, since it has lost its pragmatic function (cited in 郭建中2000:43). Nevertheless, today?s translators have offered new elaborations on Yan?s “elegance”. For instance, some believe that “elegance” is to maintain the style of the source l anguage.
Though there have been different opinions on Y an Fu?s triple principle, it has never been abandoned by translators in China. Y an Fu?s achievement is undeniable in the Chinese translation history. Y an Fu, himself, together with his translation outp ut and translation theory, opened a new chapter in the translation history of China.
Chapter Three Translation Strategies adoption
3.1 The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies
The cultural factors of translation have been laid more and more emphasis on in the past decades. Scholars and experts in this field recognize that translation is not merely an information-transmitting process, but a “culture transcending process” (V ermeer, 1992:40). “Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, wh o, perhaps more than any other scholars in the field, have been responsible for putting translation studies on the academic map”, as is said by Edwin Gentzler in the Foreword to Constructing Cultures (Bassnett & Lefevere, 2001:ix).
At the historic 1976 Conference in Leuven, Belgium, the translation studies established its status as independent discipline. Ever since then, the growth of this subject has been a successful story till now. Translation studies, as a discipline in its own right, is occupying new space, bringing together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, culture, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and aesthetics.
In the 1990s, Susan Bassnett and AndréLefevere co-edited the collection of essays entitled Translation, History and Culture, as is viewed as a milestone in the field of translation studies. They maintain in the introduction of the book that “the study of the practice of translation had moved on from its formalist phrase and was beginning t o consider broader issue of context, history and convention.”(ibid, 2001:123) It is then that translation studies officially took the“cultural turn”. They are the first scholars to suggest that translation studies take the“cultural turn”. They argue that t he study of translation is the study of“cultural interaction”.
Many other scholars also make significant contributions to the cultural turn apart from Bassnett and Lefevere. Among them some renowned books are Translation Studies—An Integrated Approach by Mary Snell-Hornby, Language And Culture—Contexts in Translating by Eugene A. Nida, and Approaches to Translation by Peter Newmark.
Chinese scholars have also attempted to conduct their translation studies from the cultural perspective in the past two decades. Some essays regarding the topic can be found in Chinese Translator?s Journal, in which there are many articles on the topic, such as “The Cultural Transplant of Translation—compromise and compensation”(Tu Guoyuan,
No.l, 1992),“Some Translation Problems Caused by Cultural Amalgamation” (Xu Dan, No.3, 1998), etc. An anthology entitled Culture and Translation (Guo Jianzhong, 2000) collects most papers which tries to discuss translation and culture either from the macro- or from microcosmic perspectives.
3.2 André Lefevere’s Theories
Lefevere, together with other scholars in Translation Studies School, has made
outstanding contributions to the improvement of the academic status of translation and translation studies.
AndréLefevere fully develops his ideas on translation and culture in his book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Frame.In this book, he focuses in particular on the examination of very concrete factors that systematically govern the reception, acceptance and rejection of literary texts.
He maintains that two factors play a vital role in determining the image of a work of literature as projected by translation and the two factors are, in order of importance, the translator?s ideology and the poetics dominant in the receiving culture at the time the translation is made.
In Lefevere?s view, “ideology” is not a sense limited to the political sphere, rather it seems to be the grillwork of form, convention, and belief which orders our actions. Ideology is often enforced by the patrons, the people or institutions that publish translations. Translations are not made in a vacuum. Lefevere holds that translation is closely related to authority and legitimacy, and ultimately, to power. The dominant ideology in the TL culture dictates the translation strategy and the solution to specific problems. The influence of ideology upon translation is sometimes so powerful that even“faithful translators can be influenced by the dominant ideology without themselves knowing it” (Lefevere, 1992:13). Even for so long “faithfulness” or “equivalence” between the source text and target text is regarded as the overriding criterion when judging a translation, it turns out in fact to be not always supreme when in conflict with the need for translation to serve ideology, just as AndréLefevere points out, “if linguistic considerations enter into conflict with considerations of an ideological… nature, the latter tend to win out” (ibid, 1992:31).
In essence, Lefevere, together with other scholars in Translation Studies School, conceives translated text as a product created in the service of a certain ideology. In their view, no one escape his/her own ideology and translation can never be unbiased. Therefore, the task of the theorist should be to reveal the ideological factors underlying the translation activity.
3.3 Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Strategies
Lawrence Venuti is one of the influential scholars who broaden translation studies within the socio-cultural framework. It is Lawrence V enuti that differentiates the two translation strategy as domestication and foreignization. Although the concepts of domestication and foreignization, as two translation strategies, have been mentioned in different names, they were first put forth by Lawrence V enuti as two corresponding terms in translation studies in his 1995 book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.
By domestication (also called domesticating method or domesticating translation by V enuti), V enuti referred to the translation strat egy “in which a transparent, fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text for TL readers” (Shuttle & Cowie, 1997:43-44). Domesticating method intends the translated text to comply with the norms of target language usage. Most important of all, it
should be fluent and idiomatic. According to its supporters, domestication can effectively avoid misrepresentation of the original text caused by cultural discrepancy.
In contrast, foreignization (also called foreignizing method or foreignizing translation by V enuti) designates the type of translation “in which a TT is produced which deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original” (ibid, 1997:59). It subverts conventional ideas of what is fluent discourse in an attempt to simulate for the reader the experience of reading a foreign text written in a foreign language.
As a culturally oriented translation theorist, V enuti upholds the strategy of foreignization rather than domestication. He calls for the strategy of foreignising that keeps the text foreign, thus making it read like a foreign text in English. In his opinion, this strategy has the advantage of resisting the domestication of the text and of forcing the reader to realize that he or she is grappling with a text that has been interpreted by the act of translation. Thus, it can maintain the foreignness of the ST and challenge the target language culture, which is, according to him, “resistancy” against the dominant ideology of the target culture—Anglo-American culture, to be particular. However, V enuti?s avocation of foreignising translation does not lead to complete give-up of the domesticating method. He also admits that still some translation involves some domestication because it translates the ST for a target culture and depends on the dominant culture value to become visible when it departs from them. He also considers domestication and foreignization to be “heuristic concepts...designed to promote thinking and research” rat her than binary opposites.
V enuti?s attitude is especially of great importance for today?s world where the penetration and assimilation of western culture are so salient. With the quickening pace of globalization and increasing cultural exchanges among different cultures, a flexible application of domestication and foreignisation is of significance for translation practice.
Conclusion
This thesis explores the translation of journalistic English from a cultural perspective. Undoubtedly, journalistic English translation can make a good branch of translation studies. The study of journalism translation must be carried out in a combination of journalism writing and translation theories. Journalistic English translation is supposed to subject to certain criteria, which are determined by the nature of translation and the more importantly by the specific purposes of translation.
This current thesis explores journalistic English translation in China with the aid of cultural translation studies bo th at home and abroad, especially Lawrence V enuti?s translation strategies. The strategy of foreignization is preferred, which is probably out of three considerations: Readability , translator?s subjectivity , and cultural differences. This preference is of great help to popularize the English language and culture.
However, this emphasis on foreignisation does not blindly exclude domestication, which acts as the understudy whenever foreignization gives rise to cultural barriers. In effect, in this era of cultural exchanges, what translators should bear in mind is that the translation should be as foreignising as possible and domesticating when necessary.
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