Last Month, I’ve introduced something about News translation and relevance theory.

This time, I’m gonna make it into practice,account for some translation phenomenon and summarize some general strategies for news translation and basic translation techniques from the perspective of relevance theory.

see how these two could work together…

1. Strategies for News Translation

Translation serves as a means of communication in terms of politics, cultures and economy in the international community. News translation guided by any translation theories should follow general strategies for news translation. Translators and translation theorists around the world have proposed general strategies for translation which are still worth reviewing in the journalistic translation.

Those theories that gained popularity are Yan Fu’s “faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”. However, Yan Fu’s principles don’t take the readers’ responses into account. In the western world, some scholars also proposed translation principles. According to Tyler, a good translation should comply with the following principles:

“1. The translation should give a complete transcript of the idea of the original work.

2. The style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original.

3. The translation should have all the case of original composition. ” (Shen Yuping, 1999) Other principles are Eugene A. Nida’s “dynamic equivalence”, Peter Newmark’s “communicative translation” and “semantic translation”, to mention a few. These strategies and criteria are not conclusive and all have their disadvantages, so they must be integrated with special stylistic styles and make adaptations accordingly, otherwise target readers can hardly be fulfilled. Based on news features, the general strategies for all news translation should follow the principle of fidelity, readability and adaptability.

2. Approaches to News Translation from the relevance-theoretical perspective

Under the framework of relevance theory, Gutt proposed two approaches of translation: indirect translation and direct translation. The two approaches are put forward on the basis of the interpretive use of languages. Direct translation and indirect translation are two important notions held by Gutt.

Gutt maintains that “direct speech quotations preserve exactly what was said, whereas indirect speech quotations give an indication of what was meant.” (Gutt, 2001) From the perspective of relevance theory, indirect quotations demonstrate a resemblance in cognitive effects while direct quotations indicate a resemblance in linguistic forms.

The relationship between the two is that the former is an inter-lingual equivalent to the latter.

Read Also: Strategies and Approaches for News Translation under Relevance Theory (Ⅱ)