ABSTRACT
This chapter probes into the news reports on the South China Sea dispute and their English translations by China’s multilingual news website Xinhuanet. It aims to examine how China is represented via re-narration of news discourse. This chapter draws on the attitude framework of appraisal theory developed by Martin and White (2005) and the reframing strategies summarized by Baker (2006) in the translation-oriented perspective of narrative theory. Such theoretical bases are applied to investigate the embedded attitudinal deviation and the stance re-instantiation in the reframed news stories. Moreover, this chapter employs the software NVivo 11 to build a corpus containing 91 pairs of Chinese-English news reports collected from Xinhuanet. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that Xinhuanet re-instantiates its news stance in the reframed news discourse: in the Chinese version, China is reported with a positive stance. It is depicted as the more powerful side which makes no compromise in this issue. In the English version, however, although China is still described in a positive stance, its superiority is not mentioned and it is portrayed as a side willing to ease the tension and solve the conflict through negotiation. This chapter argues that the possible causes of such deviation may be concluded as different target readerships, Xinhuanet’s institutional protocol as mouthpiece and China’s social political beliefs of peaceful rising.
