ABSTRACT
Journalistic discourse is a valuable and indispensable site for “promoting ideologies”. As social media is booming and impacting journalism, news organizations attempt to figure out better ways to implement their ideological roles on these novel platforms. This chapter explores how social media changes the transformation and delivery of translated news reports, focusing on representations of ideology. We regards news translation on social media platforms as a practice of multimodal recontextualization involving textual, audio-visual transformations, and typographic elements. Based on a case analysis of 21 translated news articles related to the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump's presidency from the WeChat public account (微信公众号 “wēi xìn gong zhòng hào”) of Reference News, which is a state-run daily newspaper with the largest circulation in China, we investigate how ideologies are enhanced or mitigated with multimodal signs in translated news and discuss how social media creates new spaces for journalistic translation in shaping ideologies. We argue that news translation on social media communicates ideologies through a triple mediation involving language, non-verbal elements, and platform-specific constraints/extensions.
