Refraining In News Translation

In an era of information globalization and international communication, newstranslation has been a fertile field for research. However, an examination of theexisting literature on news translation shows that most of the studies have been done inthe fields of linguistics or translation studies, and lingered merely on such topics astranslation principles, criteria, strategies and techniques, while few have exploredchanges of news frame in translation from a holistic view. Hence this thesis taps intothe bourgeoning field from a communication theory to explore one of the substantivefeatures of news translation: reframing.This thesis explores the translation of news reports as a second-time cross culturalcommunication process by drawing on the notion of “frame” in the news framingtheory. According to this theory, journalists set up a news frame in the inclusion andsalience of information, through which readers define or interpret what is going on andmake sense out of the event. However, the frame anchored in a specific political,economic, social and cultural context may not be perceived by receivers in a differentculture. Therefore, news translators tend to use various reframing strategies toredistribute salience to the theme and elements of the news texts. In this sense, newstranslation is a complex site where the already framed news discourse undergoes areframing process, with the original frames being undermined and a new one beingfabricated. The reframing strategies can be detected at the macrostructure of newsframes that redefines the theme of a news report, the intermediate structure thatdemonstrates the inclusion and reorganization of information, and the microstructurethat expresses the frame in symbols.This is a case study in which a contrastive frame analysis is conducted between thetranslations in Reference News and their source texts regarding the transformations inthe themes embodied at the macrostructure, the inclusion and organization of variouscategories at the intermediate structure and the expressions at the microstructure, thusto explore the specific reframing strategies and leading factors that define thereframing process. The findings suggest that reframing occurs at all the three levels ofnews frame. Reframing of the macrostructure can be achieved by transforming themain themes indicated in the headlines and leads; reframing of the intermediatestructure includes re-sizing the various categories in one news report and synthesizingthe categories of multiple source reports; and reframing of the microstructure can berealized by labeling the key elements in a news report with lexical items, terms orphrases that reveal the translator’s attitude and by repositioning translator as a reporter. The reframing process is subjected to the influence of political ideologies, culturaltraditions and textual traditions, mirroring the conflict of national political ideologies,bearing the constraint of cultural traditions on members of the same nationalcommunity, and reflecting the discrepancies of textual traditions between the sourceand target languages.