Narrative Framing In English-Chinese Translation

China’s mainstream films have gained increasing popularity recently.Wolf Warrior 2 and The Battle at Lake Changjin,as the most representative ones,have made a record-breaking box office of several billion.The boom has also drawn great attention from foreign media.Reference News(Cankao Xiaoxi),as China’s official mainstream media that publishes news reports from foreign media,has high political authority and strictness.However,manipulations in the translated reports overseas concerning China’s mainstream films on Reference News have been spotted.According to Mona Baker’s narrative theory,news translation,as a public narrative,could influence readers’ interpretations through various framing strategies.When news texts are communicated through ideologically different communities,narrative framing occurs more frequently,but was presented in a more implicit way linguistically.In other words,while no obviously violent words or discourses are shown on the linguistic level,the implication and ideology conveyed through those words or discourses indicate an aggressive and conflicting attitude.Current studies of narrative framing on non-aggressive or non-political news discourse are inadequate.This study aims to reveal news discourse reconstructed through translation between China and the West—two ideologically different societies,analyze the hidden ideological conflicts behind the narrative framing of normal news discourse through translation and the reasons for the phenomenon.This study has adopted discourse analysis on micro-level and narrative theory on macro-level,and combined Baker’s narrative theory and Huang Qin’s discourse analytical model as its research framework.On this basis,this study also describes textual and paratextual features of the translation on China’s mainstream films on the Reference News website;carries out qualitative analysis;and explains the reasons behind such translation phenomenon and its social and ideological impacts.The study has found that the translations about China’s mainstream films on the Reference News website underwent a framing process through selective appropriation,labeling and participant repositioning,along with paratextual framing.In this way,these framed translation reconstructed the target readers’ understanding about the news texts,and weakened the ideological conflicts between China and the West in the source texts.Textual analysis has indicated that translators in news translation did not make random choices.Instead,translators were subject to the impact of international relations,social context,and mainstream ideology of the target language.At the same time,the framed translations contributed to and finally enhanced the building of mainstream ideology of the target society.Paratextual analysis has shown that new forms of media provided the communication of news discourse with more room for framing.In this case study,paratext has strengthened the effect of ideological reconstruction on the textual level in the form of titles,lead,related links and video clips.Such paratextual elements have placed readers in a more complex reading environment where the original attitude of the text was blurred and the ideology of the target society was emphasized.In conclusion,news discourse often undergoes a narrative framing process in different ways when being communicated between ideological different groups.However,such narrative framing has usually been carried out in an implicit way.Translators are not merely passive receivers of the source texts,but active constructors who bear much influence from the target mainstream ideology.The revelation of the conflict and narrative framing behind translation is conducive to a more insightful understanding of the significance of translation activities in discourse exchange and the building of ideology in society.