Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Translation About The South China Sea Issue

The news media in China and the U.S.provide regular reports of the South China Sea issue,and it has become a show of strength for both sides.For the U.S.,news translation about the South China Sea also plays a vital role in getting international support.Watching America is a news website which translates the other countries' political news.It claims to convey others' thoughts about America objectively and accurately.WA translates many Chinese news reports on the South China Sea issue.This thesis collects all the English target news related to the issue and its source Chinese news,then constructs a parallel corpus with the aid of corpus tools.Drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis model and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics,this thesis analyzes the parallel corpus,to explore how China's stance and ideology on the South China Sea issue are translated from Chinese to English in WA.Through a detailed analysis,it finds that WA embeds its ideology into target news discourses through multiple linguistic devices.(1)In terms of lexical classification,WA modulates essential keywords in the source news into the words with the same meaning but different semantic prosody,and it blurs the translation of basic terminologies.(2)In terms of transitivity,nominalization is used quite frequently,to be specific,it is WA's conscious choice to delete the Actor of the sentence or change the position of the Actor by nominalization to circumvent the responsibility,while the passivization is appropriately used.(3)In terms of modality,WA uses less high-value modal operators,and use more median and low modal operators to add acceptance for its readers.(4)In terms of reporting verbs,WA replaces forceful and powerful reporting verbs in the source news with less power to weaken China's firm stance and tough attitude on the issue.Above all analyses,it shows that the translation shifts do repeat in WA during the translation process,and the target news in WA is not objective and accurate,and it also confirms that the U.S.has a bias towards the Philippines side on the South China Sea issue.