Nancy Xiuzhi Liu - News Framing Through English-Chinese Translation: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Media Discourse

• 1 Story code (start with 001, followed by 002, 003 and so on)
• 2 Newspaper code
  • 1=Reference News (RN)
  • 2=Financial Times Chinese (FTC)

This study focuses on the examination of two unique newspapers, the FT Chinese and Cankao Xiaoxi (the Reference News , RN), which publish translated news in the Chinese context. The interest of the book is not only about what news is translated and why it is translated, but more crucially how translated news should be interpreted and explained in the globalized world.

Source text of the FTC, the Financial Times (FT), is a quality British newspaper that builds its fame on reporting international and business news worldwide with a history of 125 years. According to its website, Today, the FT serves more readers and subscribers across the world than ever before and is recognized internationally for its authoritative and trusted news, commentary and analysis. As a representative Western newspaper in China, FT Chinese.com claims 2.6 million registered users to date in early 2018. Its news streaming is also freely accessible on devices operated by systems such as iOS, Android, Windows and Kindle.

The Chinese newspaper Cankao Xiaoxi (the Reference News , RN) was launched as early as 1931 under the Xinhua News Agency, the most authoritative news wire in China. It is a daily newspaper with the largest circulation in China that publishes news translated from various newspapers worldwide. Its unique style and dissimilar narratives from other domestic media are appealing to a large readership. With its online version (http://www.cankaoxiaoxi.com/) launched in recent years, it enjoys even larger popularity, the site claiming of having 693,300 users as of 10 January 2018. It has also launched its own app on mobile devices, whose users are incalculable.

As one of the representative newspapers, the FTC also enjoys its popularity among the Chinese middle class for its in-depth coverage of news stories and insightful comments on news events. Examining into the news on the website of the FTC finds prominent features differentiated from the news written directly in Chinese. News stories assert themselves in every respect as translated from English rather than written directly in Chinese. Firstly, the translators names are conspicuously shown at the end of a news story. On top of that, English proper names from the source text (ST) are always provided in brackets in the translated Chinese target text (TT). For example, English names of Chinese companies or people are kept in brackets instead of getting them across directly in Chinese. Concerning a Chinese state-owned enterprise for instance, translation of the Chinese company is followed by the English name in brackets (Rizhao Steel) instead of adopting the Chinese name directly as a news story written in Chinese usually does. Reading into news stories in comparison to the ST in English discovers that there are various deviations between the two versions: either a playing down of the tone or bringing out an implicit message. The initial presupposition was that it is not something caused by the translators failures, given the fact that almost all the translated texts are followed by the name of a translator instead of keeping him/her anonymized or invisible as is the practice of many international news agencies (cf. Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009). Initial comparison of the contents also points to disparate framing effects. Concerning events in Xinjiang for example, one incident was framed as a loss of innocent lives under the headline Further Violence Claimed Eight Lives in Xinjiang on the FT (30 December 2013), while it was framed as a terrorist attack in the Chinese media. In the translated news on the FTC on the same day, it was represented as 8 (explosion happened in Yarkand, Xinjiang, with 8 people killed).