| This thesis strives to conduct a contrastive analysis of the international politicalnews report discourses as a sub-variety of news discourses from the perspectives ofthe systemic functional grammar and the critical discourse analysis. The thesis iscomposed of four chapters.Chapter 1 is a literature survey of the studies on international political newsreport discourses. A retrospection of the development of the studies on newsdiscourses in general from home and abroad is conducted in the beginning. The earlystudies on news discourses are the studies on the stylistic features of difference textualstructures of the discourse. Scholars like Wang Zuoliang, Ding Wangdao, Brook,Crystal and Davy contributed to the news studies by summarizing the stylistic featuresof the news discourse in their stylistics monographs respectively. With the popularityof Halliday's systemic functional grammar, a lot of researchers such as ShangYuanyuan, Chen Dongchun, Liang Lujin adopt Halliday's theories in the study ofnews discourse analysis. The analysis of the news discourse has developed fromstylistic description to functional analysis that pays attention to the social function ofthe news discourse and analyzes social and functional reasons for the choice ofspecific language forms at different levels of the news discourse. Since its appearancein the 1970s, theories of critical discourse analysis have been widely adopted instudies of news discourses. Analysts like van Dijk, Fowler, Fairclough, ChenZhongzhu, Xin Bin, etc. make great contributions to reveal the implicit ideologicalmeanings in the news discourse. Scholars like Scollon, Liu Miqing and Liu Qizhongdevote their efforts to the comparative analysis of English and Chinese newsdiscourses. As the understanding of the news discourse deepens, it is found that thenews discourse is a quite complicated genre with various kinds of classifications anddozens of sub-varieties that are discrepant from each other. Analysts begin to shifttheir attention to the analysis of the sub-varieties of the news discourse. Theinternational political news reports as one of the sub-varieties of the news discoursebegin to catch the attention of researchers. Prof. Yang Xueyan summarizes thestylistic features of this sub-variety and her graduate student Deng Xiaowen appliesthe systemic functional grammar to a diagnostic study of English-Chinese translationof international politics news discourses. A lot of achievements have been made in thestudies on news discourses, thanks to the persevering efforts of the analysts fromhome and abroad. It is obvious that the study and research concerning the newsdiscourses is far from being exhausted and there is still a lot to be done. This thesisselects the sub-variety of international political news reports as the subjects of theanalysis and it is the first contrastive analysis of this sub-variety.Chapter 2 deals with the theories and methodologies adopted in the contrastivestudy on international political news report discourses. The theoretical framework ofthe contrastive analysis of this thesis is a combination of several approaches todiscourse analysis including functional discourse analysis and critical discourseanalysis. Some major theories from the systemic functional grammar such as the threemeta-functions of language and the concepts of transitivity, modality, thematicstructures and cohesion are mentioned thereby. The theories of critical discourseanalysis and concepts like ideology and power are also introduced in this chapter. Thetheories of functional discourse analysis and critical analysis are combined as thetheoretical framework because the two theories have similarities in their goals of thediscourse analysis and they are complementary to each other in providing analyticaltools for the analysis. Research methods like illustration and quantitative statistics areadopted to guarantee the validity of the results of the analysis.Chapter 3 is devoted to the contrastive case study of Chinese and Britishinternational political news report discourses from the perspectives of systemicfunction grammar and critical discourse analysis. In order to ensure the credibility ofthe contrastive analysis, the samples are selected from the official websites of twoprestigious newspapers, namely People's Daily and the Guardian. The twenty samplediscourses are series reports of the secret prison scandal of the CIA. The similaritiesand differences of the sample discourses in classification, transformation, thetransitivity system, intertextuality, modality, thematic structures, cohesion andrhetorical devices are explored in this chapter. It is found that the similarities in thedistribution of process types and abundance of reported speeches in the Chinese andthe British sample discourses are determined by the characteristics of the genre ofinternational political news report discourses. The differences in the standpointbetween China and Britain in the issue find full expression in differences inclassification, transformation, intertextuality, modality and thematic structures in thesample discourses. The characteristics of the two languages determine that there isless use of transformation and overt cohesive devices and more set phrases andmetaphorical expressions in the Chinese samples than in the English ones.In Chapter 4, the conclusions got from the contrastive analysis of Chinese andBritish international political news report discourses are adopted to give someimplications for the translation and teaching of international political news reportdiscourses. The international political news reports in the prestigious newspapersrepresent the voice of the government and are closely related to political issues and anation's international influence. Therefore, the translation of such discourses shouldbe conducted with great caution. The translators should make some adaptations tomake the news reports in accordance with the standpoint of the newspaper and therequirements of the target readers. As the present study is just limited to thecontrastive analysis of the twenty sample discourses of international political newsreports concerning one international issue in two newspapers, the implications on theinternational political news translation is by no means a set of systemic translationstrategies. I hope this study can give some inspiration to the future researchers in thisfield and with more attention and effort we can come up with a set of systemictranslation strategies for the translation of the international political news reports. Inthe English departments of many universities, selected news reading is taken as amajor course. Among these selected news discourses, the international political newsreports take a large proportion. In this chapter, I venture to give some suggestions tothe comprehension and teaching of international political news reports in accordancewith the analysis in the previous chapter.This thesis is an attempt to investigate the Chinese and British internationalpolitical news report discourse as a sub-variety of news discourses from theperspectives of the systemic functional grammar and critical discourse analysis for thefirst time. It offers a new insight into the contrastive analysis of the specific text type.Further studies still need to be undertaken to deepen our understanding of the newsdiscourse and perfect the translation and teaching methods of the news discourse.
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