A Study on the Translation Strategies of Political News from the Perspective of Gatekeeper Theory

Abstract

The gatekeeper theory is initially proposed by American social psychologist Kurt Lewin, and then advanced and officially applied to news study by David Manning White, a scholar specialized in communication. In its essence, it points out that only the information which meets the gatekeepers’ values and standards will be chosen and further advocated. With the help of this theory, scholars study into the information spreading process from a brand new angle.

Nowadays the exchanges of news among nations increase drastically, with their contents covering various fields such as politics, economy, and culture. Thus it becomes unprecedentedly important for the news translators to play the role as gatekeepers.

In this thesis, I will do a parallel text analysis of the political news from Cankaoxiaoxi against its original form in English, to find out how gatekeepers function in the process of news translating. Based on the analysis, the translation methods and strategies are discussed and summarized from the perspective of non-literary translation.

This thesis consists of three main parts: The first part introduces the gatekeeper theory briefly in order to provide the theoretical bases for the latter parts. The second section illustrates the reflection of gatekeeper theory in news translating，i.e. why the news translators act as gatekeepers and how they manage to do it, with examples in parallel texts. The third part is the discussion and summary of news translating methods and strategies in paragraph, sentence and vocabulary levels, from the perspective of non-literary translation.

Key words: communication, gatekeeper theory, non-literary translation, political news translation, translation strategy