The Role of Evaluative Language in News Translation : Focusing on Soft and Hard News

Abstract

In the digital era, news consumption is not confined in geological boundaries. Technological advances bring the instant dissemination of news into life and allow news audience to consume events that occur far away almost in real time. The transmission has blurred the boundary between traditional media and new media, and the one between physical and virtual world. That is, what if a journalist applies news framing to the news translation process? This paper aims to investigate the gap between the ST and the TT created when the source news texts undergo a translation process. To achieve this aim, the appraisal theory developed by White (2003) is employed to identify a difference between the ST and the TT. Furthermore, we have attempted to identify differences between soft news stories and hard news stories while the STs from both news stories are translated into the TTs. Two time-sensitive events, Hugh Grant’s marriage and a U.S. and North Korea summit, were selected. The former (a soft news story) is extracted from the Telegraph and the latter (a hard news story) is from the Washington post. As a result, it was found that such strategies as attitude, engagement, and judgment were used when the source news texts from the hard news story are translated into the target news texts. Under the appraisal theory, the strategies involve evaluative language which refers to positive or negative language that judges the worth of entities. In general, it is said that a journalist frames the SS (especially from the hard news story) to convey his ideology to news consumers. Hypothetically, we assume that a similar framing process takes place in deriving the TT from the SS of the hard news story. Thus, we could conclude that the TT from the hard news story differs from the TT from the soft news story and that the difference can be explained within the framework of White’s appraisal theory.