Representations of Hong Kong in news translation: a corpus-based critical narrative analysis

Since the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, there have been various high-profile socio-political incidents which have attracted significant media attention. This study investigates how the 2014 Hong Kong protests have been represented in the translated news produced by selected media, and how these narratives have been (re)framed from their original versions. Media outlets selected include Reference News from the Chinese mainland, EJ Insight from Hong Kong, BBC Chinese from the UK and The New York Times Chinese from the US. The data collected draw on English and Chinese translations of event coverage from these outlets, and their related source texts published in a range of international mainstream media. The research proposes an integrated theoretical framework which incorporates narrative theory, framing theory and corpus linguistics. It deploys a corpus-based critical narrative and framing analysis of both original and translated news articles about the Occupy Central events as a case study. The research identifies several factors that shape the narration and (re)framing of translated narratives and non-narrative comments, including translation/transediting conventions, institutional procedures and socio-cultural contexts. It identifies some consistent patterns in narrative techniques in respect of narrators, retroversion and frequency, and the employment of diverse framing strategies at the textual, intratextual and paratextual levels. The textual trajectory of news translation, situated in different roles in institutional settings and subject to variations in the translation procedures, are often the results of mediation between divergent power relations within the media outlets. It also manifests the media outlets’ political stances and the imbalance in the relationship between the media outlets and their target readerships.