Study on the Cultural Differences in the Translation of E-C Political News and Translation Strategies

Abstract

Along with the increasingly close cooperation between China and the outside world on the economy, culture and politics, the international news is making deeper impact on people’s daily work, study etc.. Especially the political news is indispensible since the political influence on the economy and culture is direct and obvious. Take the tense relationship between Japan and China recently as an example, the tense atmosphere leads to the decrease of both countries’ daily trade volume and blockade of the information interaction on the Internet etc.. Because of the language barrier between the English reporters and Chinese readers, the English political news are translated into Chinese by some mainstream media in the Western countries and China before presenting to the Chinese readers. However, the translating of the English political news is not only the transfer of the language, but also the transplanting of the culture. Any puzzle or misunderstanding caused by the cultural differences in the political news translation will bring about the misinterpretation and may cause the diplomatic conflict even the war. Thus the translating of the political news is a challenge for any translator.

The paper uses Venuti’s and Nida’s translation theories as the theoretical basis and political news selected from the “Reference News”, “China Daily” and “Voice of America” media as the object of the research. In this paper, the cultural differences in the political news are classified into five categories, which are: historical allusions, territorial environment, religious faith, ideology and way of thinking. After that, two translation strategies are put forward and discussed based on the domestication and foreignization theory. They are the translator’s recreating and filling the cultural blank. Besides, the author has found that neither of those two strategies is applicable to the last category “way of thinking”, hence the “word-for-word” approach is enough for the interpretation of the original meaning.

This paper is not only a practical application of the classical domestication and foreignization theories, but also has direct guiding function in cultivating the intercultural thinking for the English learners and translators.  

Key words: political news, cultural differences, domestication, foreignization, translation strategies