A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of COP 26 in Chinese and Western Media

Abstract

This study compares lexical choices employed by Chinese news media (including China Daily, Xinhua news agency, People's Daily Online, etc.) and western news media (including BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, CNN, UN News, etc.) in their coverage of the joint declaration between China and the United States made during the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), indicating that China and the United States would work together on a number of climate-related actions. Through the combination of corpus linguistic method and discourse analysis, together with relevant theories of news editing and translation (news transediting), this study finds out similarities and differences between the Chinese and western media. The results indicate that both media focus on conveying to readers the direct information about target news. However, compared with Chinese media reports, the western media adopt more quotes, particularly direct ones. In addition, the western media also selects news material and information deliberately by covering some unnecessary information to show the conflict between countries, sharpen contradictions, and thus form certain “National Image”. The Chinese reports from Chinese news media, by contrast, prefer to use more indirect quotes over direct ones when writing reports in Chinese. When the targeted readers change from the Chinese to the westerners, however, news editors and writers would consciously increase the use of direct quotes in order to conform with the thinking pattern, daily habits, aesthetic value and ideology of people there in English reports from China. The findings can shed light on the practice of news editing and translation for Chinese EFL learners.