Multimodal Discourse Analysis And Translation Of COVID-19 News Reports On Chinese Government Website

As the portal website of the Chinese government,www.gov.vn provides real news,real-time policies and life-related services.These functions are particularly important in the context of the global epidemic of COVID-19.As an important sender of COVID-19 information,www.gov.vn has the characteristics of high authority and strong influence.With the rapid development of mass media,news texts including text,pictures,and other multimodal resources have become information carriers worth studying on government websites.Kress and Leeuwen(1996),Lim(2004)and Martinec and Salway(2005)developed the theory of Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis on the basis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,which provides a theoretical basis for the analysis of image,text and image-text relations in multimodal texts.In this paper,we respectively selected all the news reports about the COVID-19 epidemic released from January 2021 to June 2021 on the Chinese(43 images)and English version(34 images)of the Chinese government website(www.gov.vn).We analyze the similarities and differences under the framework of SF-MDA through quantitative and qualitative methods,summarizing the important and difficult points in the translation of government websites,and finally discusses the feasible ways to improve the multimodal translation.As the results show,there are some differences between both versions of the Chinese government website.English version of the government website has a substantially higher proportion of representational meaning than the Chinese version.As for compositional meaning,the Chinese version of the government website prefers separating various units of information and showing their differentiation by framing.Similarities can be seen in interactive meaning.Both versions of the government website represent equality and truthfulness.When it comes to the image-text relationship,the Chinese version of the news report prefers to make the text subordinated to the image by using smaller font sizes and more concise text units,thus highlighting the dominant position of the image.In contrast,images tend to subordinate texts in news reports on English version websites.The specific and vivid words project more meaning.The difficulty in the translation of epidemic texts on government websites lies in fully understanding the meaning of the sender and how to combine the process of translation and communication.