中外英文报刊词汇使用对比研究(2)
In this paper, conclusions are judged to reach through the comparative analysis of both Chinese and English word analysis. The paper attempts to select news texts as the target discourses. The texts were chosen from the most politically authoritative newspaper in China and America that is China Daily and New York Times. As it is required for the similar register (politics and business and entertainment), style (formal and informal) and topic when doing comparative discourse analysis, the same affair reported in these two newspapers is selected. The reports on hot issues in recent months, therefore, become target discourses. As selected articles involve both China’s and America’s political focus, economic interests and entertainment spotlight, and may affect the Sino-American relationship, the two newspapers resort different ways to do the report these events because of different political stances or cultural perspective. In such cases, different words are utilized to express varied sentimental color, traditional culture and other subtle features.
2 Literature Review
The most dynamic factor in language, vocabulary, often sensitively reflects changes in the social life. While dramatic changes in social thoughts and life, including the social revolution and the scientific and technological revolution, tend to affect vocabulary in another way(Chen Lin, 2005). With more and more frequent exchanges between China and western countries, international news, as one of communicating tools, plays an even more essential role in everyday life. The vocabulary in the news text not only reflects changes in societal life, but also persity of various cultures. Many scholars have discussed the characteristics and features of news words.
In recent years, the research on news has been attached great attention. Huang Qin (2007) mentioned that in general, the results of newspapers in translation studies at three stages showed a direct proportion trend, especially since 2000, four times as much as the first two stages. This reflects news translation studies scholars increasingly intense research interest. In contrast to heat research interest in translation, the analysis of a word is rarely favored.
Early in 1921, Sapir, a renowned linguist has said. “Language, like culture, can seldom supply itself.” Readers can easily find that newspapers from different countries choose different words to convey the same issue. Take Chinese culture-specific words as an example. When using Chinese culture-specific words, American newspapers always choose form over meaning to express same meaning if the two can’t be reached together. “Bean curd project (豆腐渣工程)” is a typical example. Meanwhile, mass media in China would rather maintain the meaning even it seems irrelated, such as “jerry-built project(豆腐渣工程)”. There are, of course, other kinds of reasons. Gao Rong(2011) attributed such disparity to varied readership. From the perspective of China newspapers, they take more consideration on the text readability for foreign audiences and acceptability, and then using the Naturalization. In western world, the mass media positions the reader both home and abroad, so the translation is to meet the readers’ curiosity and a sense of belonging, thereby instilling national ideology and the use of Alienation.
On the one hand, scholars in China who discussing the theory of Alienation and Naturalization translation strategy put great emphasis on keeping the original form of language , focusing on the source language , and apparently in most cases only relating to language level , which is largely the sequel of discussion on literal and free translation. The Venuti’s theory of alienation, while also advocating difference of language and style, it has strong pertinence that resist the phenomena, such as “many important texts were made edge position and the distortion of value in history of translation (Venuti, 2004)”. These phenomena were the result of widespread translation strategy to enable texts more readable and fluent.The difference of language is insignificant part of alienation. Therefore, the connotation and denotation of Venuti Alienation theory are simplified and reduced in China, which is one of the typical phenomenon showing the “naturalization” of Venuti Alienation theory.
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