关联理论视角下的汉英新闻翻译.pdf

中南民族大学 硕士学位论文 关联理论视角下的汉英新闻翻译 姓名：肖锋 申请学位级别：硕士 专业：外国语言学及应用语言学 指导教师：罗建生 2011-05-12 on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory iv 摘摘 要要 21 世纪是一个信息化的世纪， 铺天盖地的新闻已经成我们日常生活不可或缺 的一部分。伴随着经济全球化进程的加速和中国综合国力的不断增强，中国作为 亚洲第一大国，世界第二大经济体，越来越受到世人的瞩目和关注。中国与西方 国家的经济、文化交流也越来越频繁。汉英新闻翻译也逐渐受到重视，成为翻译 学的一个重要分支。在以往各种争论不休，各执一词的翻译标准下，汉英新闻翻 译的标准也变得非常模糊和不确定。因此，本文摒弃了传统的诸如“信、达、雅” 和“动态功能对等”等理论，采用了语用学中新兴的由斯珀伯和威尔逊提出的关 联理论来指导汉英新闻翻译。希望借助该理论来重新审视翻译过程，并尝试性地 提出一些可行的翻译策略来指导从事汉英新闻翻译的工作者。 本文从介绍背景知识开始，论述了该研究的必要性和重要性，提出了研究的 方法和目的以及文章的结构设置。本文详细阐释了新闻的定义、价值、特点和新 闻翻译及其特征。本文着重介绍了作为研究理论框架的关联理论，将汉英新闻翻 译中涉及的有关概念逐一呈现，并运用关联理论剖析了汉英新闻翻译的本质、过 程和目标。 在该理论陈述的基础上， 笔者通过分析大量真实的汉英新闻翻译例子， 分别从词汇， 句法和篇章三个层面对关联理论指导下的汉英新闻翻译进行了探索。 结论部分指出了该研究的不足之处，并为将来进一步的相关研究提出了建议。 关联理论本身虽然不是专门的翻译理论，但是鉴于汉英新闻的特殊性及其翻 译的主要要求，关联理论可以被借用于有效地指导汉英新闻翻译。尽管在实际应 用中还有一些模糊和不足之处，但是随着该理论的不断完善和汉英新闻翻译实践 的深入展开，笔者相信关联理论对汉英新闻翻译会有更强的解释力和指导作用。 关键词: 关键词: 新闻；汉英新闻翻译；关联理论；翻译例证 on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory ii abstract widespread news has become an indispensable part of our daily life in this 21st century of information. with the acceleration of economic globalization and strengthening of chinas national power, china, as the largest country in asia and the second greatest economy in the world, is attracting more and more worldwide attention. also the economic and cultural exchanges between china and western countries are getting more and more frequent. under this circumstance, the greater importance is gradually attached to c-e news translation which has become a major branch of translation. with the constant disputes among traditional translation criteria, the criterion for news translation has become very ambiguous and uncertain. therefore, this thesis abandons the traditional translation theories such as “faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance”, “dynamic functional equivalence theory” and adopts relevance theory, an uprising pragmatic theory proposed by sperber and wilson, to guide c-e news translation. it intends to reexamine the process of translation with the help of relevance theory and tentatively put forward feasible translation strategies to guide the translators in c-e news translation practice. this thesis starts from introducing the research background which demonstrates the necessity and significance of the research, then puts forward the methodology and objective of the research plus the layout and structure of the thesis. in the next part, the thesis elaborates the definition, value and characteristics of news followed by news translation and its features. then relevance theory, as the theoretic framework of this thesis, is introduced in details. also some crucial concepts in relevance theory involved in c-e news translation are explained one by one. then the nature, process and pursuit of c-e news translation are analyzed from the relevance-theoretic approach. based on those theoretic statements, the author respectively explores the c-e news translation on the levels of lexicon, syntax and discourse from the perspective of relevance theory with authentic examples. lastly the conclusion of the research is naturally drawn and 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 iii limitations of this research as well as suggestions for further study are presented at the end of the thesis. relevance theory itself is not technically a translation theory. but due to the uniqueness of chinese news and the main task of c-e news translation, it can be applied to guide c-e news translation. although there is still some fuzziness and shortcomings in the practical application, the author believes relevance theory will have a stronger explanatory power and provide better guidance with the continuing perfection of the theory and the expansion of c-e news translation practice. key words: news; c-e news translation; relevance theory; translation exemplification 中南民族大学中南民族大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研究所取 得的研究成果。除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外，本论文不包含任何其 他个人或集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品。 对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个 人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律后果 由本人承担。 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，同意学 校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版， 允许论文被查 阅和借阅。 本人授权中南民族大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入 有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本 学位论文。 本学位论文属于 1、保密，在_年解密后适用本授权书。 2、不保密。 （请在以上相应方框内打“”） 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 research background with the uprising of its economy and national status, china is playing a more and more important role in the international community. the world is eager to know this asian lion and foreign countries dig their way out to get as much information about china as possible. to achieve international recognition, china should do more to be known by the world, and the most convenient channel is news. instead of letting foreigners be misled by the foreign medias which can never be aware of what is really happening in china, chinese government can use more talents to translate the chinese news into english. in this way foreigners can be more accessible to know about china; besides, misinterpretation and distortion can be avoided as much as possible. news translation is an ancient yet original major which owns a history as long as that of the newspaper. however, far from enough importance has been attached to news translation. on the mainland of china, although more and more colleges have been starting to set up courses on news translation, few coursebooks specially designed for this subject can be found in the book market. in the translation classes of english majors, news translation is either casually mentioned as translation of a special genre or neglected based on the fact that this field remains nearly untouched. before the title of the research was nailed, the author found out that theses and academic works focusing on studying or guiding translations of other types could be found everywhere. for instance, there are many translation studies on classic fictions, contemporary fictions, poetry, prose and non-literary works like advertisements, legal documents and scientific and technical literature, etc. however, little research or studies on news translation have been done. news translation, with its unique features, can hardly be treated or even guided by the theoretical achievements on other types of translation. on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory 2 as a branch of translation studies, news translation study can not just be ignored because it is of great significance to many people who are translating news as their daily work. they need some guidance as well as a certain criterion to lead them in conducting practice of news translation. and apparently those principles for other branches of translation are not applicable to news translation, so it is essential to do some researches customized for this subject. the findings of those researches can be extremely helpful and meaningful to news translators. therefore, this thesis intends to study news translation from the perspective of relevance theory. although relevance theory itself is not designed for translation studies, it is a very influential cognitive and pragmatic theory which has been proved to be highly applicable and fairly informative. also it has been applied to explain some other types of translation practice. enlightened by this, the author plans to make a tentative study on news translation in the theoretical framework of relevance theory. 1.2 methodology and objective of the study the news translation research in this thesis has been done within relevance theory approach proposed by linguists sperber and wilson. relevance theory is powerful in explaining other phenomena as well as human communication. although it is not meant for translation, it gives many inspirations to translation, which helps the translator to achieve adequate pragmatic effects of the target text in news translation and fulfill the task of news translation. the exploration for the right theory in news translation is discussed on the basis of the analysis of the particular purpose and features of news, the language and culture differences between chinese and english news and their relation to news translation. the evaluation of whether the theory is appropriate for news translation is based on the investigation of the pragmatic effects of the target text. relevance theory is the theoretical framework adopted in the research, so the relevance-theoretic approach is the one used to study news translation. based on 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 3 relevance theory, the aim of news translation will be analyzed, the translators inferential role in translation will be explored, the nature of news translation will be illustrated, and an rt-based model for translation will be constructed. exemplification is also adopted in the present study. some pieces of news and their translation will be enumerated and analyzed to prove the authors viewpoint. those examples of news are collected mainly from newspapers or magazines published in the recent years. as mentioned more than once, the objective of this study is to figure out the nature as well as the process of news translation from the perspective of relevance theory, in the hope of helping news translators with their translating practice. 1.3 layout and structure of the thesis the whole thesis consists of the following six chapters: chapter one specifically introduces the research background of the present study, including its significance, necessity and feasibility. also the methodology and the objective of the study are covered in this part. chapter two focuses on news and its translation, in which the definition, the characteristics and the value of news will be stated. besides, news translation and its features will be discussed in this part. chapter three is all about a survey on relevance theory, in which some crucial concepts will be examined one by one. and on top of that, the main contents of this theory will be presented as the theoretic framework of the study. chapter four will apply relevance theory to c-e news translation. firstly the nature, the process and the goal of translation will be redefined from the perspective of relevance theory. then the scope will be narrowed down to c-e news translation. chapter five will respectively explore the c-e news translation on the levels of lexicon, syntax and discourse from the perspective of relevance theory with many authentic examples from the media. on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory 4 chapter six will draw the conclusion. it will summarize the entire study and present the implication of its findings. also limitations of the current study will be pointed out and suggestions for further studies will be made. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 5 chapter two news and its translation the 21st century is known as the age of information. and news is a big kind of information sources. when someone turns on tv, news broadcast is there. when someone opens the newspaper, hundreds of pieces of news are there. when someone surfs online, a lot of news pops out once in a while. when someone checks his mobile phone, a piece of news comes into its inbox in a wink. and even when someone is taking a bus or a taxi, unexpected news comes from the radio on air. news is everywhere. it is so common in our daily life, yet not many people have noticed it. and we take those international news for granted and never have a thought that perhaps they are translated from other languages, say, english, let alone how they are translated and come into our sight in this way. 2.1 definition of news when we first learnt the english word “news”, the english teacher told us the origin of this word to help us learn it by heart: in this word, letter n stands for north, letter e stands for east, letter w stands for west and letter s stands for south. information which comes from all those four directions is called news. in chinese, the counterpart of the word “news” is the word “xinwen” in which “xin” means new and fresh and “wen” means “to hear or listen to”. the well-accepted definition of news in chinas academic world is that “news is the reporting of recent events” (lu dingyi, 1990:226). also many people know the joke that it is not news when a dog bites a man; while it is definitely news when a man bites a dog. this may sound very absurd and rude. but no one can deny its truthfulness. according to melvin mencher (2003:68), any information which owns the following two attributes can be marked as news: a) it is information about a break from the normal flow of events, an interruption from the expected, a deviation from the norm; b) it is information people need to make sound decisions about their lives. in a word, news refers to the latest events which happen all on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory 6 over the world. 2.2 news values based on the definition stated above, it is easy to find that every day, every hour, even every minute thousands of pieces of news come into being. but not all of them have the opportunity to come into our sights. there are no detailed criteria on selecting news, but ask any editor or veteran journalist, they know which pieces are worth to be reported while others are left to be discarded. then it is news values which decide on the different treatments, which numerous pieces of news will get. according to some survey, seven unanimous attributes which make a piece of news newsworthy are listed as follows: (1) timeliness and freshness. in the definition of news, words like recent, latest are emphasized. this explains why the immediacy of news reporting is of great importance. also in chinese, news is called xinwen and the character xin means new and fresh. old stories can not even be counted as news, let alone be newsworthy. also there are some teasing idioms like “as old as yesterdays news”; “that is news in 1970”, indicating peoples lack of interest in news which is not new at all. (2) prominence. prominence is the element which evaluates the famousness or the renown of the event itself or the core people in the event. people such as leaders, authorities, members of the royalty, business elites or notorious villains always catch more eyes from the public. as for the event, when it is something so hard to achieve or realize that no one else could possibly have done it, it is prominent. for example, the magician david copperfield successfully escaped from a sealed iron box hung up high in the air. or an indian yoga practitioner amazingly survived without having meals for fifty days. (3) impact consequence and significance. this is the element which accesses the degree of relatedness to peoples interests. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 7 also the greatness of influence on society and space is taken into account. for example, the household 911 terrorists attack in new york in 2001 caused severer damages and somehow made the american government decide to declare the war of counterstrike. also natural disasters such as 5.12 wenchuan earthquake in 2008, american hurricane katrina in 2005 and indonesian tsunami in 2004 led to such bad consequences that no one would ignore them. they instantly drew worldwide attention and people united and called for help for disaster relief. in addition, international events like the olympic games and the world cup fifa and the latest breakthroughs of technical innovation or health care are always under the spotlight of peoples concern. (4) geographic proximity. it is the element which applies to spatial distance as well as cultural associations. some events may be very international, while others are just more local. and you can not help but pay attention to things that happen right around you. the closer the event is to you, the more likely it will catch your eyes. for example, you are living in wuhan; and the news says the city is going to build a disneyland. you will be interested in the details while your old friend who lives in beijing would not be as much entertained. as for cultural associations, people on the mainland are more likely to be concerned about political as well as civil affairs in taiwan than those in malaysia or singapore, because the mainlanders and local taiwanese share the same traditional culture. (5) conflict and contradiction. conflict makes a movie interesting, so it arouses news. conflict is often the highlight or the climax of the event. the events that workers go on strike to fight for better welfares, or confrontations between two different ethnic groups stand up against the authorities, etc. can be of great news value. (6) unusualness and oddity. as a previous example has stated, it is not news when a dog bites a man, yet it is absolute news when a man bites a dog. this perfectly explains this element. it is odd, it is novel, it is unbelievable and it is what the audience is seeking for. people are tired of on c-e news translation from the perspective of relevance theory 8 the daily routine they have to repeat from dawn to dark. and the things that depart from their ordinary life are exactly what they expect to see. sometimes in order to intrigue the reader, the editor has to spice up the story a bit. (7) human interest. people are more related to those real stories happening among them. handicapped people achieve great accomplishments through persistence; cancer kids are very optimistic towards life; a mother loses her life in order to keep her baby from the attack of wild wolves. those stories make us think and act. they encourage us to be courageous and sympathetic. through reflection we often find our own shadows in those plots. according to zhang jian (2004:33), universally appeal to peoples interest are the stories of such subjects as crime, moral and ethics, population, life, marriage, family, friendship, love and emotion, money and sex. 2.3 characteristics of news 1) authenticity and accuracy. truthfulness is the life as well as the power of new