（英语语言文学专业论文）汉英新闻翻译的篇章方法研究.pdf

ma thesis ningbo university 汉英新闻翻译的篇章方法研究 摘摘 要要 本研究课题旨在从语篇语言学的角度探讨汉英新闻翻译。文章主要采用 beaugrande 和 dressler 提出的七项语篇性特征作为文本分析的框架，从衔接、连贯、意向性、可接 受性、信息性、关联性、互文性这几个方面分别揭示了中英文新闻语篇的特点，并提出译 文中重建这些语篇标准的方法及依据。 受到新闻价值、受众以及传播渠道等多重制约，以往以句子为基本翻译单位的传统语 言学翻译方法以及“忠实”、“准确”等翻译原则已经不能满足新闻翻译的实际要求。超 越了传统语言学只注重语言本身研究的局限，语篇语言学更加注重对语言交际功能的研 究。它的发展为翻译研究注入了新的活力，启发翻译工作者高屋建瓴，从语篇整体把握意 义和交际功能的传达。作为评判语篇的语篇性原则，也为译语的重构和评价提供了原则性 标准。 本论文共分五章： 第一章总体介绍了本课题的理论依据和新闻翻译研究的现状。第二章为理论综述，介 绍了语篇语言学、语篇性特征以及其对翻译研究的可接受性。第三章结合新闻的一般语篇 特征分析了新闻翻译的特点和翻译原则。第四章在七项语篇性标准内探讨了新闻翻译策 略。任何语篇都具有语篇性原则，但是一种语言的语篇性标准并不一定适用与另一种语 言。从语篇外因素看，意识形态，社会习俗、受众特点，思维方式等都直接影响语篇性标 准在新闻语篇中的体现。意向性、可接受性、信息性、关联性、互文性等在中/英文新闻 中的表现各有异同。从语篇内的角度分析，新闻语篇在衔接和连贯上有显著的特点：新闻 的宏观结构（倒金字塔式）具有衔接和连贯的作用，信息一般按重要性排列,连贯性比较 松散。受到思维方式的影响，具体到段落内部汉语中的信息排列仍呈流散状，侧重于隐性 连贯，而英语新闻更依靠显形衔接手段。只有充分认识语篇性特征在不同语篇中的表现并 为此做出相应调整，才能创造出符合译语规范的合格翻译产品。第五章为简要总结，即一 ma thesis ningbo university 篇好的新闻翻译应该是简洁，流畅，完整的语篇，能够有效传达最有价值的新闻内容和交 际功能，具有良好的语篇性标准。为了达到这一标准，译者有权对原文做适当的调整，这 一过程中译者的主观能动性和新闻受众的特点应该得到足够重视。 关键词：语篇语言学，新闻翻译，新闻语篇，语篇性原则关键词：语篇语言学，新闻翻译，新闻语篇，语篇性原则 ma thesis ningbo university a study of news reports translation from a text linguistic approach abstract as a contemporary applied language variety, news possesses its distinct characteristics no matter from intra-text or extra-text perspective, which determines that news translation deserves special attention and treatment that differs from the treatments to other translation genres such as the literary or technical translation. modern translation studies tend to absorb creams from various disciplines to framework their systematic theory that offers guidance in translation practice. text linguistics, as a discipline to study both language and the interrelation between language and situation, is proved practicable and feasible in translation studies. this thesis is an attempt to make an investigation into news translation from a text linguistic orientation, which intends to fall back on the theory of textuality put forwards by beaugrande and dressler in 1981. with the brief investigation of the news features from both the macro- and micro-text structure, the thesis ventures into the corresponding translation criteria and strategies that are operative in reconstructing the 7 standards of textuality in the target news text. chapter one serves as a brief introduction of the whole text, in which the current studies on news translation are briefly generalized. in chapter two text linguistics is introduced and its applicability to translation studies is explored; the textuality as the constitutive principle of text is introduced as well. chapter three includes two sections. the basic attributes of news text are examined from lexical, syntactic to the super-textual perspective; news translation criteria are explored in the light of those attributes mentioned above. chapter four is the kernel part of the whole thesis, in which are explored the seven standards of textuality in english /chinese news texts and the methods to reconfigure the target news text with the reference of the textality. text inherently owns the seven standards of textuality, which, however, may have different demonstrations on different language varieties. english news and chinese news exhibit similarities as well as dissimilarities in the ma thesis ningbo university constitutive principle. from the extra-textual perspective, many factors such as ideologies, social conventions and audience characteristics may directly affect the intentionality, acceptability, informativity, and situationality of the news text. from the intra-textual perspective, the differences of cohesion and coherence patterns between chinese and english news text can be traced back to the fact that chinese is paratactic prominence while english is hypotactic prominence. a translator should be quite aware of the seven standards of textuality of both the source text and the target text and try to reestablish a clear, smooth, unified news text with sound textuality that conforms to the target language conventions. during the procedure, the author suggests that the translators subjective intention and the position of the news audience should be highly valued. keywords：text linguistics; news translation; news text; textuality ma thesis ningbo university - 1 - 1 introduction 1.1 significance of the topic this thesis is a study of news translation in perspective of text linguistic approach. every moment we receive tremendous amount of information through different kinds of channels, such as newspapers, magazines, radio broadcast, tv, internet, mobile phone messagestechnology has reduced the world to a global village in which people can communicate with as much speed and ease as possible. the village members try to keep informed whilst publicize themselves in order to promote a higher international image. news, as one of the most important means to convey information, plays an important role and penetrates in every corner of the modern society. with the entrance of the wto and the further development, china has come into more contact with the outside world. china needs to know more about the rest of the world and to be understood better by the other countries. for this purpose, news industry has developed with an astonishing speed. at the same time, news translation has correspondingly exerted a significant function on the international communication. admittedly not all the news reports about foreign countries are translated without exception before they reach the domestic audience. in fact most reporters dispatched abroad write news directly in their mother tongues. nevertheless, translation remains its prominence as a bridge of communication. especially in some local press or radio/tv stations in china, chinese-english translation is highly required in an attempt to present the local custom and regional developments to the foreigners in order to promote the exchange at various levels. at present, news translation is far from satisfactory. poor translation appears in different kinds of press and media, which has produced a negative image of china and would likely mislead the foreign audience. aimed to improve the translation quality, the study of news translation is imperatively required. last semester, with my supervisor professor zhangs help i got a good chance to translate news for ningbo tv station. my participation in this work inspired me to rethink various ma thesis ningbo university - 2 - factors that influence the news translation and the strategies and criteria that should be followed in news translation. compared with other translation varieties, news translation has many unique features. news has encyclopedic contents that encompass everything from a gifted child in the neighborhood to the iraq war, from a pop stars love affair to the mystic universe exploration, which requires the translator to be equipped with various domains of knowledge. news language, also called “journalese”, contains much clich and rough writing, which determines in some cases the faithful rendering of the source writing style does not work. additionally, news requires accuracy and objectivity, but news text is unavoidably contaminated by the ideology of the text producers that is likely to conflict with that of the translator and the target language community. facing a piece of news, seldom does a translator have enough time to consult an expert or polish the news version. all these factors determine the previous lexical- oriented and bottom-up translation methods and criteria cannot satisfy the complicated translation procedure. the news translators need a more feasible and instructive guidance in their translating process. at the beginning of my practice on news translation, a sentence-to-sentence translation method was employed. but the version i produced is wordy and unnatural. luckily enough, every time my supervisor modified these versions meticulously before broadcast. under his guidance i came to realize that ignoring “textuality” in news translation is the key reason for the awkward version. realizing the deficiency of my previous translation strategy, i began to be more conscious of the notion of “text” in translation. “the text is the central defining issue in translation” (neubert they found that news in arabic inclines to using more indirect speech than news in english. dantas-whitney and grave (see connor 1996) analyzed many portuguese and english editorials and proved that editorials in portuguese are less formal in tenor yet looser in text structure. candace seguiot (see neubert the others pay more attention on the editing and adaptation during the translating process (see chen mingyao (陈明瑶 2001a), cao hongxia (曹洪霞 2000), yu jianshu (俞建树 2001), etc.) besides, influenced by critical linguistics, the ideological analysis in news translation has aroused much attention. many scholars hold that translation strategy is manipulated by the translators ideology and communicative intention (see zhu tianwen ( 朱天文 2003), huang fuhui (黄富慧 2002), etc.) generally speaking, however, their arguments lack the study framework to carry on systematic studies. in addition, some special parts of news (e.g. the headlines, the leads) are more likely to be highlighted in news translation for their prominence, but the studies on these subjects are still limited largely on the wording and sentencing process (see xu mingwu 2003, zhang jian 1997, chen mingyao 2001b, etc). 1.3 organization of the thesis the thesis includes five chapters. the first chapter is a general introduction of the whole thesis. the second chapter is about theoretical background, which introduces the current study of translation from text linguistic approach and the applicability of textuality to translation study. the next chapter offers a general introduction of news text and some insights into the news translation strategies and criteria. chapter four is the kernel part of the whole thesis, in which a thorough analysis about news translation is carried through within the framework of “textuality”. the applicability of the textual approach to news translation is tested and some translation strategies are proposed. the last chapter is a general conclusion. ma thesis ningbo university - 5 - 2 a survey of the translation studies from the text linguistic approach 2.1 concept of text basically speaking, there are two different opinions on the concept of text. formal/structural linguists hold that text is made up with sentences and it is a linguistic unit larger than the unit of sentence. the other opinion is held by the functional linguists. differing from the former opinion which considers the text as a grammar unit larger than clauses and sentences, the latter holds that the text is a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning (halliday the relation between text and sentence is “realization.” that is to say, a text does not consist of sentences, it is realized by, or encoded in sentences. so far, many definitions about text are given but none of them are comprehensive: hatim and mason (2001:178) hold that text is “a coherent and cohesive unit, realized by one or more than one sequence of mutually relevant elements, and serving some overall rhetorical purpose.” nida (2001:198) considers text as the “basic and ultimate units that carry meaning”. hu zhuanglin(胡壮麟1994:1) considers text as “any stretch of natural language with a complete meaning, produced in a certain context and not wholly restrained by syntax and grammar.” to beaugrande and dressler (1981:3), text is the “ communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality, (i.e. cohesion, coherence, intentionaliy, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality.) halliday and hasan (1976:1-2) pointed that “the word text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” “a text is regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning.” from their definitions above, one can conclude some basic attributes of the text. first, a text should be a unified whole in meaning, it is a complete semantic unit no matter what length it is; secondly, a text is not an isolated object, it is created in a certain context and must meet some constructive standards; thirdly, the text must exert some communicative function. sometimes linguists use “text” and “discourse” interchangeably. in fact there is no strict boundary between the two notions. some people insist that text is a much narrower notion than ma thesis ningbo university - 6 - the notion of discourse (see hatim while discourse is “a far broader structured event manifest in linguistic (and other) behavior” (see bell 2001:162). sometimes discourse is considered as the text in use, and the text is realized by the discourse in reality (see e.g. widdowson 2000). some scholars use “text” to refer to the written documents while “ discourse” to speech, the others consider them the same (see halliday neubert huang guowen (黄国文1988), etc.). besides, as to the discipline concerned, european scholars prefer to use “text linguistics”, while the american and british scholars are in favor of “ discourse analysis” to designate the same subject. studies at home seldom distinguish the two terms. in this thesis the author does not intend to distinguish “text” with “discourse”. the term “text” will be employed instead of the term of “ discourse” throughout the whole thesis. 2.2 the text linguistic approach to translation study 2.2.1 the applicability of text linguistics to translation study as a budding discipline, translation study needs to draw in the findings of other disciplines to develop its own theories. the fruit of text linguistics has offered a lot to translation study. text linguistics, also called discourse analysis or text analysis, got a tremendous development over the past three decades. having absorbed the fruits of traditional linguistics, semeiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature, it has built up its own realm focusing on communicative function of language. text linguistics aims to elaborate the inner mechanism knitting the components of a text into a whole and the relation between language and context. it not only brings a brand new perspective to the reexamination of the linguistic phenomena but also provides a constructive way for translation study. the theories and findings of text linguistics have impelled the translation study shift from the previous way focusing on word and sentence to a higher levelthe text. text linguistics began to play a leading role in translation study during the 1990s. the textual approach to translation studies differs from the traditional linguistic approach in its text- based conception of meaning and its notion of translation equivalence. it locates equivalence at ma thesis ningbo university - 7 - a textual and communicative level instead of the sentential or lexical level. as the function and the meaning the text conveys are by no means attained by the simple sum of the respective sentences, only a thorough comprehension of the text in communication can help a translator to be more insightful in reconstruction of the target text. therefore, the textual approach takes into consideration not only the intra-linguistic factors but also the extra-linguistic factors in translating process, namely, the relation between the text and the outside world, the influence of context etc. in fact, the notion of “text” has been stressed long ago in translation studies. as the famous translation theorist nida (2001:198) has mentioned, “ the focus of attention of a translation is texts because these are basic and ultimate units that carry meaning”. in the book of language and culture (2001), he uses a whole chapter to discuss the organizational, the content and the rhetorical features of a text in translation process. neubert and shreve (1992:23) consider the process of translation is“text-induced text production”. they hold that the translation text should convey not merely the source meaning but also its pragmatic functions. the bottom up translation that begins with words and their discrete meanings can never yield acceptable target language texts. they advocate the translation is a “top-down” recreation of the text through the purposeful selection of the target language resources. in another words, translator should first get an overview of the source text, identify the macro-textual factors such as the structure characteristics, information focus and writing style etc, and then decide the translation strategies and deploy the language resource accordingly. for a long time text linguistics was less an explicit “theory” than a practical and empirical approach for supporting research on languages or culture (see e.g. malinovaski 1923). as professor huang guowen (1988:7) remarked that at present, text analysis fails to attain agreements both on theories and on practice. even up to now it is a discipline without a unified theory, in that researchers hold different purposes and emphasize on different aspects in their studies. as a result, text linguistics is by no means omnipotent for translation studies even though it has shed much light on them. some of its theories can never fit for translation study. just as wilss (1982:113) said, “by no means text linguistics research, despite or perhaps because of its manifold ramification, is relevant for the science of translation and to the same extent.” therefore a proper analysis framework is highly preferred. in the next section the seven standar