On Transediting Of China-related News From The Perspective Of Narrative Theory

The transediting of China-related news plays an essential role in the cross-cultural communication, for it is an indispensable channel for Chinese readers to learn how foreign media react to the current news in China. The practice of news transediting had come a long way, but the research in this field did not start until the late 1980 s at home and abroad. Without systematic theoretical insight,most of the previous studies merely focused on translating techniques by listing some sporadic examples. The thinking on how to explore specific texts at micro level and also recognize the role played by news transediting in the interpretation of news events at macro level becomes the starting point of this research.The narrative in literature research concentrates on structural analysis within the text. Mona Baker’s narrative theory focuses on four types of narratives at macro level, and meanwhile employs narrative techniques in translation at micro level to analyze translated texts and interprets connotative meaning of each framing strategies in the retelling of news stories. The combination of the above two provides the news transediting with a new perspective which combines macro and micro level. This thesis is a case study on the transediting of China-related news under the theoretical guidance of Baker’s narrative theory. The research questions of the thesis are:(1)What are the differences between transedited Chinese news in The Reference News and original English news in terms of news topic and narrative feature?(2) How does the traneditors select topics and employ framing strategies to modify the narratives elaborated in the source texts?(3) With a narrative account, why does the transeditors select certain topics for discussion and employ framing strategies in re-narrating news stories?Methodologically, the thesis explores transedited Chinese news(including source texts) on the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference(below referred to as the NPC and CPPCC) in The Reference News. Based on close reading of the news texts, the thesis makes a quantitative analysis on the differences between foreign media and The Reference News in news topic and narrative strategies. Then, it further compares the transedited Chinese news texts with the original English texts before putting forward strategies for topic selection and three specific framing strategies to re-narrate news stories in the target context. After that, it sets forth typology and features of narrativity to explain the reason for selecting topics and employing framing strategies in the news transediting.The conclusions of this thesis are as follows: The Reference News ranks a series of topics on foreign media and gives different level of attention. As for the difference in narrative feature, The Reference News rationally draws upon the narrative features of original English news, and meanwhile employs three framing strategies to reconstruct the narrative in target contexts. The thesis points out Baker’s theory offers a new research perspective to the transediting of China-related news: in cross-cultural communication. The objective of new transediting is not limited to transferring texts, but to set up fair and rational conversations between original texts and targets readers. In the practice of news transediting, the transeditors should be familiar with the narrative strategies of foreign media, identify the narrative featuring western centralism while respecting the news facts. They should employs framing strategies to reconstruct the original narrative in a rational way in the target contexts so as to maintain discourse power.