| Nowadays, with the rapid development of informatization and globalization, the mass media are playing an increasingly significant role in the coming future of a country. International news, as the main form of mass media, exerts great impact upon people’s mode of thinking and concepts of values, and therefore international news transediting has been emerging as an important force and gave a boost to the cross-cultural communication. Besides, it has been attracting much attention from converging scholars with its particularity and has become the focus of translation studies. Reference News, an official newspaper under the auspices of Xinhua News Agency, boasts latest information at home and abroad and enjoys the largest circulation among all the Chinese newspapers on the daily basis. Its wide coverage of various topics ranging from politics, economics to military affairs and technologies holds appeal for a large audience. It is universally acknowledged that news has much impact on readers and on their construction of cultural identity. For this reason, the present paper selects the original foreign news and the transedited news in Reference News in both January and February of 2015 as the objects of study.In recent years, studies on news transediting have been conducted from various perspectives. However, domestic scholars’narrow understanding of the postcolonial theory leads to its little application on news transediting. Postcolonial theory is famous for its broad perspective and deep sights. The present paper, with two concepts— "hegemonic discourse and counter discourse" as well as "cultural identity" — as theoretical basis, attempts to undertake research on news transediting in Reference News. Focus will be laid on the expounding of how the Third World countries fight with hegemonic powers for discourse power and reconstruct their national cultural identity, and it is also expected to prove the applicability of postcolonial theory on the news transediting as well as on the domestic discursive practice.The present study finds that, on the one hand, by means of its strong discourse power, western media appeal to three weapons—overwhelming output of news, one-way flow of information and ironic tone in news reporting — to deprive the Third World countries of their right to speak and cast them into the western stereotyped image and, in this way further launch a new campaign of new cultural colonization. On the other hand, Chinese media regain the discourse power with the four strategies of counter discourse and then reconstruct the national cultural identity. First, subversion of theme is realized through manipulation of standpoint, rewriting of comment-styled title and addition of core tips. Then appropriation of language makes it possible to change the subjective elements in the source text by means of transposition of subject and shift of synonym with different emotive colouring as well as the use of localized phrases. In addition, in the translation process, a variety of translation strategies have been employed to accentuate or undermine certain information and viewpoints and further affect readers’ perspectives of the news, such as the use of boldface, quotation marks, repositioning of information, deletion and collage. It is hoped that the present thesis can shed some useful insight into the further in-depth and systematic study of news transediting. |
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