Chapter OneINTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

The advent of globalization has greatly promoted the communication among differentnations and information is disseminated at an ever-high speed. News, the carrier ofinformation and the channel for people to know the latest issues happening all over theworld, is playing an increasingly important role in international exchange andcommunication. As is known to all, international exchange and communication isprincipally the exchange of politics and economy, as the two are closely related to thedevelopment of a nation and people’s daily life, thus placing politico-economic news at aparticularly crucial place. However, owing to limited human resources and other restraints,news agencies in a sole nation cannot cover political and economic issues of every aspectin each corner of the world; besides, news agencies of different nations may have differentstances on the same politico-economic event. Therefore, to gain a comprehensiveknowledge of the world’s politico-economic information and different nations’ attitudestowards the same politico-economic event, many nations tend to translatepolitico-economic news from main news agencies of other nations, making newstranslation a heatedly discussed topic of researches in recent years.As a category of news, politico-economic news shares the common features of newssuch as freshness, significance and accuracy. However, at the same time, politico-economicnews distinguishes itself from other categories of news in that it contains obvious politicalstance and dominant ideologies of a nation.

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1.2 Research Methodology

This research primarily focuses on politico-economic English news translation andprobes into it from the postcolonial perspective. Both descriptive and interpretativemethods are applied to decode the postcolonial reflections in politico-economic newstranslation. Besides, to do an uncomplicated quantitative study, the author collected awhole-month’s Reference News from March 1stto March 31st, 2013 as a sample. Hence, alldata analyzed in this thesis will be a collection of Reference News in this time span and allthe cases quoted or extracted are also from Reference News over this time span paired withtheir English original source texts collected from the Internet. All the source news textsfrom which the examples are cited will be presented at the end of the thesis as appendicesfor readers’reference.

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Chapter TwoLITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Existing Researches on News Translation

To start the discussion of news translation, it is necessary to have a clear definition ofnews first. Numerous scholars have defined news from different angles. The widelyaccepted definition of news by Chinese scholars is proposed by Lu Dingyi in 1943 as:News is the report of an event that happened lately (Wu & Zhu, 2011: 26). After the ThirdSession of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC, studies on news began to flourishand on the basis of Lu Dingyi’s definition, many scholars put forward new concepts onnews. The author has selected some typical definitions summarized by Lei Yuejie (1997:65-68) as follows: news is the report about present political or social events by newspapers,news agencies, radios and TV stations; news is a unique way of influencing publicopinions via reports or comments on latest facts; news is the dissemination of latelychanged facts, etc. Whatever the definitions are, they all reflect the “authenticity,timeliness and publicity” of news. As far as the author is concerned, news must be trueevents instead of virtual imaginations; news should be events that have just occurredinstead of history; news should be opened to all people rather than limited to small groupsto pose an influence on social values.

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2.2 Limitations of Existing Researches on News Translation

The foregoing review has demonstrated scholars’ growing interest in news translationstudies on both translation practice and translation theories, not only from the linguisticperspective but from the cultural perspective as well. Despite the extensive researches doneon news translation, the author still finds the following limitations of existing researches onnews translations:Firstly, numerous researches have been done on news translation as a whole whilenone is dedicated to addressing politico-economic news translation that the authorconsiders to be the major part of international news. Politics and economy are inextricablyconnected to each other with particularly important status in this globalized world and dueattention should be paid to politico-economic news translation independently.Secondly, despite the fact that various theories have been applied to study news translation both from linguistic and cultural perspectives, such as relevance theory, registertheory and theories concerning ideology, researches on news translation from thepostcolonial perspective are rare. Though some scholars like Wei Tao have touched uponthis perspective, their researches have not adequately taken into account ubiquitousdiffered power relations and inequality in postcolonial theories. In other words, thesystematic researches on news translation, especially politico-economic news translationfrom the postcolonial perspective remain to be conducted.

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Chapter Three THEORETICALFRAMEWORK.........13

3.1An Introduction to Postcolonialism....13

3.1.1 Definition and research scope of postcolonialism......13

3.1.2 Development of postcolonialism........15

3.1.3 Key figures and their concepts.....16

3.2 Postcolonialism and Translation Studies........19

Chapter Four POLITICO-ECONOMIC ENGLISH NEWS TRANSLATION.... 26

4.1 Reference News and Politico-Economic News.....26

4.2 The Postcolonial Perspective on Politico-Economic News....28

4.2.1 Inequality in source news selection....28

4.2.2 Inequality in news translation strategy.....32

4.3 Decolonization in Politico-Economic News.........36

4.3.1 Decolonization in source news selection....... 36

4.3.2 Decolonization in news translation strategy.........38

4.4 Decolonization Methods in Politico-Economic News Translation.....39

4.5 Summary.........47

Chapter Five CONCLUSION.......48

5.1 Major Findings......48

5.2 Limitations of the Thesis........49

Chapter FourPOLITICO-ECONOMIC ENGLISH NEWS TRANSLATION FROMTHE POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

4.1 Reference News and Politico-Economic News

Reference News is a newspaper daily published by Xinhua News Agency with thelargest circulation of over three million in Mainland China. As the Chinese government'sofficial news agency, Xinhua carefully selects news reports from major news agencies,news journals and newspapers all over the world, and then translates them into Chinese inskillful ways. As a particular kind of newspaper in China, Reference News possessesunique features. The most distinctive feature is its role as a reference. As mentioned above,all the news in it is translated from original news in the world’s main newspapers fromdifferent aspects, and it thus acts as an “overlook at the pattern of the world, focus on thechanges in the world, insight on the trend throughout the world” (Liu, 2012). Anotherdistinctive feature of Reference News is its language style. It takes media around the world as its database and selects a part from it to organize its own daily magazine. The languagefeatures of the original foreign news are often preserved to ensure the authenticity of news,thus distinguishing Reference News from other domestic newspapers in terms of languagestyle.

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CONCLUSION

News translation has always been a hot topic in the academic field with inspiring fruitsachieved. On the basis of scholars’ previous achievements, the author focuses on thetranslation of politico-economic English news from the postcolonial perspective and takesReference News as a case study. After a relatively thorough and detailed analysis, theauthor comes to a conclusion here with major findings and limitations of this thesis. Politico-economic news, which is closely related to the politics and economy in anation, will inevitably have certain political tendencies. The postcolonial theory, centeredon the power differentials and inequality among different nations, has providedpolitico-economic news translation with a brand-new perspective. By analyzingone-month’s politico-economic news in Reference news and their original source texts, theauthor has the following findings:Firstly, there’s postcolonial tendency in politico-economic English news translation intwo aspects: news selection and news translation. In politico-economic English newsselection, translators tend to select most of the politico-economic news from world’s topnews agencies in developed nations or regions; as for news translation, translatorsunconsciously adopt the translation strategy of foreignization in politico-economic news,thus disseminating ideologies of the West into China.

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Reference (omitted)