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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 27:2 (2015) ► pp.215–237

Ideological positioning in news translation

A case study of evaluative resources in reports on China

| Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
This article investigates the Chinese translations of several English news reports on China’s human rights issue carried in Reference News, a Chinese authoritative state-run newspaper devoted to translating foreign reports for the Chinese reader, and aims to establish how evaluative resources are resorted to by the translators to facilitate ideologically different positioning in presenting events and identifying participants in the translated news. The translations are compared with their English source texts using Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) as the micro analytical framework and Fairclough’s (1995a, 1995b) three-dimension model of Critical Discourse Analysis as the explanatory framework.
Keywords: news translation, ideology, positioning, evaluative resources, reports on China
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ideology and Critical Discourse Analysis
  • 3.Ideological positioning, the language of evaluation, and evaluation in translation
  • 4.An analytical model for evaluation and positioning in news translation
  • 5.Text analysis: Evaluation deviations in the translated reports
    • 5.1Deviations in identifying news actors
    • 5.2Deviations in presenting news events
    • 5.3Deviation in dissimulating representations
  • 6.Processing analysis: Ideological positioning in “faithful translation”
  • 7.Social analysis: Possible explanations
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 8 June 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.27.2.03pan
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