A Study On Reported Discourse In English And Chinese News Texts

The reported speech is an important aspect of media discourse, especially of news report, in which different reporting modes can be adopted to report the same discourse. The choice of reporting mode is determined by many factors such as the intention, ideology and stance of the reporters. Similarly, the choice of the translation of the reporting mode in news text is also determined by those factors, of which the study is of great significance and high value. However, most of the studies in this light have been little conducted. Based on the concept of typology, this paper will adopt a comprehensive perspective and systematically analyze the report phenomenon in English and Chinese news texts as well as in the translation of reported speech by qualitative and quantitative means, clarifying how ideology influences the discourse practice in source text and target text, exploring the ideology hidden behind the translation of reporting mode from a higher social and cultural level and expanding the application range of critical discourse analysis.Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Lefevere's translation theory, this study establishes a corpus and collects 15 English reports extracted from CNN online news,15 Chinese reports extracted from CCTV online news which are all the reports of the Olympic torch relay outside China before 2008 Olympic Games, and collects 10 pieces of English news from New York Times at random and their 10 translated version from Reference News. Counting is followed on the reported speech of the two different language types and statistics are given in a table. Finally, the paper makes a comparative study of news sources, reporting verbs, direct speech, indirect speech and slipping in both texts of different languages and explicates the relations between language, power and ideology from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. The comparison reveals that news report, especially political news report, is not likely to be neutral and objective and inevitably influenced by subjective factors such as the ideology and power control of the reporter. And when one social ideology is transferring into another society through a different language, its original ideology and power control must be influenced by the translator who shall integrate his own ideology into the translation through independent selection, reaching the purpose of changing the interest relations. This paper hopes to provide some enlightenment and contributions to the understanding of reported discourse in news text and then to the news translation, as well as provide some help on how to apply a more rational way of think to news reading for the readers.