Although news belong to informative text, whose proper translation should be communicative translation, but there are also many original expressions (political speech of government man, some important figures, etc) quoted by the reporter and they needs semantic translation. Therefore, both communicative translation and semantic translation are suitable for news translation.

　　2.1 Lexical Features and Translation

　　As the most active part in language, vocabulary always reflects the changing of society and life. From words we can know social development, emergence of new things and so on, which can also be clearly observed in news writing. Besides the general characteristics of words in other writing types, journalistic words have its own features, which make the news more vivid and genuine, at the same time, attract more readers. In this part, the features of journalistic English vocabulary and their translation will be discussed in detail.

　　2.1.1 Midget Words

　　Midget words refer to the simple-structured but actively functioning words, which enjoy wide popularity because news is believed to be “literature in a hurry”, no time given to editors to consider the elegance of the wording. Besides, easy wording can largely cater for average newspaper readers from different educational background or social classes.

　　Midget words include midget nouns with large information capacity and midget verbs, which is simple but lively. For instance:

　　aim—purpose drive—campaign talk—negotiation blast—explosion

　　ask—inquire axe—reduce bid—attempt drop—abandon

　　Communicative translation can be a workable method to translate the news texts featuring midget words because the fundamental principle of communicative translation and the basic function of midget words share much in common, i.e. to smooth and accelerate information transmission. For example:

　　With jobs cuts, New York is losing war of brooms

　　(The New York Times 27/2 2004)

　　The word “cut” collocates with the word “job”. Obviously, it means “reduce”. In order to achieve the communicative purpose, it is translated into “裁减”. So the whole sentence should be translated as “纽约裁减清洁工，环境卫生恶化。”

　　2.1.2 Abbreviations

　　An abbreviation refers to shortened form of a word or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the complete form. There are two types of abbreviations frequently adopted in news: clipped Words and acronyms. For example:

　　deli—delicatessen expo—exposition homo—homosexual

　　SUV—Sports Utility Vehicle PM—Prime Minister

　　TP—Traffic Policeman UN—United Nations

　　In communicative translation of the news featuring abbreviations, the key work is still to identify the meanings of those words through journalistic conventions and replace them with corresponding Chinese equivalents. Likewise, translators are endowed with much freedom to remodel the structure of the original as necessary.

　　E.g. 1:

　　Migration raises bird-flu worries (The Wall Street Journal 2/2 2004)

　　候鸟迁徙让人们对禽流感忧心忡忡 (flu=influenza)

　　E.g.2:

　　U.N.officials discuss early Iraq elections(Albuquerque Journal 9/2 2004)伊拉克大选在即 联合国官员加紧讨论 (UN=United Nations)

　　In some cases, there is no need to translate them into Chinese any more because there are no obvious obstacles of understanding in the communication between SL editors and TL readers. For example:

　　Ex-CEO charged in Enron scandal (USA Today 20-22/2 2004)

　　涉嫌丑闻的前安然CEO受到指控

　　CEO, standing for Chief Executive Officer, has been widely accepted by average readers.

　　2.2 Characteristics of Tense and Translation

　　In this part, this thesis will deal with the characteristics of tense in English news, which have already been remarkably different from the conventional grammatical norm.

　　Newmark’s communicative translation suggests that readers are the center of translation, so TL texts should be eventually accepted and evaluated by them. When dealing with the tense, translators need also to focus their attention on the intelligibility of TL news texts. To be more specific, the translation of the tense should conform to Chinese grammar on the one hand and also respect Chinese readers’ reading habit on the other hand.

　　(1) The simple present tense adopted to indicate past and present

　　In order to stretch the immediacy and to give news readers sense of being up-to-the-date, the present tense is usually used, no matter the events take place in the past or at present. For example: