| News media play an indispensable role in people’s daily life. Apart from sending information, news media also affect people’s perception of incidents indirectly. In recent years, researchers began to notice that the news content still reflects media’s views on certain incidents, although news media are labelled to be objective and impartial. Our country’s scholars in translation studies, such as Professor Xin Bin, Professor Zhu Chunshen, etc., have begun to approach news discourses from the perspective of critical discourse analysis(CDA) and many accomplishments have been achieved.After the Second World War, the Sino-Japanese relations have been in an unstable state. In December 2012, the Japanese government decided to “nationalize” the Diaoyu Islands, which sparked widespread discontent in mainland China as well as Hongkong, Macro and Taiwan. People in those regions have organized many protests against the Japanese government. The United States, as the initiator of the dispute, also expressed its own standpoints. The network news media around the globe expressed their own views from their own positions. Watchingamerica.com is a special American news website whose news sources come from translating the other countries’ (regions’) news concerning the United States to inform the American leaders and citizens of the ways the other countries (regions) think of it. This thesis conducts an translation analysis on the Diaoyu Islands dispute from the perspective of CDA. 15 pairs of Chinese and translated English news concerning the Diaoyu dispute are selected as the research objects from the well-known network media of Chinese mainland as well as Hongkong, Macro and Taiwan, such as “Sina”, “People’s Daily”, “Global Times”, “Wen Wei Po” and “United Daily News”.CDA originates from critical linguistics and emphasizes the critical analysis on the discourses, especially the public discourses. It is devoted to unveil the hidden ideologies and power relations in the discourses. CDA is based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional discourse theory and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. In this study, the 15 pairs of Chinese and English news discourses are analyzed from three stages: in the textual stage, the study mainly focuses on the transitivity and lexical choices. In the discursive practice stage, modality and reporting modes are emphasized. In the social practice stage, the text is analyzed mainly from two aspects, namely, the historical and social background and the power relationship.Watchingamerica.com claims not to find favorable or unfavorable content, but to reflect as accurately as possible how others perceive the United States and they have no political agenda. The research result shows that neither the Chinese news websites nor Watchingamerica.com is completely neutral, because they are serving their own governments. From the point of translation, the translators for Watchingamerica.com fail to translate faithfully the news discourses in many parts. As for many criticisms towards America and Japan in the original news discourses, the translators weaken them by means of many translating strategies, which is contradictory to the purpose of the website. In the textual stage, it is more evident. From the perspective of degree of modal verbs, the modal verbs in the Chinese and English discourses are similar in the distribution range. From the point of news reporting model, indirect speech is most frequently used in the Chinese and English discourses. All these will put an impact on news readers’ perception. So the translators should faithfully convey the spirits of the original discourses to the English readers. Meanwhile, the readers should have a critical eye to quickly identify the hidden ideologies and power relations when they are reading news reports. |
PDF Full Text Request