News Translation Research Articles

Investigating translation style in English translations of Chinese editorials and commentaries from the Hong Kong Economic Journal: a corpus stylistic analysis

ABSTRACT Previous studies on translator’s or translation style have mostly focused on literary works. This study is a stylistic analysis of Chinese-language editorials and commentaries published in the Hong Kong Economic Journal (HKEJ) and their print and web versions of English translations. The study includes a corpus analysis of the original and translated news texts’ average sentence length, standardized type-token ratio, reporting verbs and high-frequency words. These are interpreted in relation to the translators’ personal attributes and the socio-cultural contexts to identify several major factors contributing to stylistic differences. This study finds that the news translation style is influenced by both source language linguistic features and target language conventions. The production of translated news texts involves the input of multiple agents, which is demonstrated in the collective traces of translation styles. The stylistic shifts between the original and translated news editorials and commentaries reflect the news outlet’s editorial stance and targeted readership. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the critical role stylistic features play in Chinese-to-English journalistic translation.

The Debatable Ending: יו‎ or ה‎

Modern translations are influenced by the debatable ending of יו‎ or ה‎ of Proverbs 30:19. German Bible translations such as – Zürcher Bibel, the German Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift, the German Elberfelder Bibel revidierte Fassung 1993, the German Darby Unrevidierte Elberfelder 1905, and Textbibel von Kautzsch und Weizsäcker – have Frau (woman) or Mädchen (girl) or Jungfrau (virgin). These translations demonstrate that the favorable reading is girl (woman or virgin) because it is influenced by the ending of ה‎. The debatale ending of יו‎ or ה‎ is noticeable in English Bible translations. The ending of ה‎ is followed by most of English Bible translations such as King James Version [KJV], American Standard Version [ASV], New International Version [NIV], English Standard Version [ESV]. Good News Translation [GNB] interprets it as the love story between a man and a woman. Aramaic Bible in Plain English, Young’s Literal Translation [YLT], Brenton Septuagint Translation, Douay-Rheims Bible [DRB], and Literal Standard Version [LST] read the ending of יו‎. Therefore, their translations are in his youth. This research argues for the ending of יו‎ or in his youth as the original reading with the usage of textual criticism and the syntactical analysis of Proverbs 30:19 as its methodology.

A Rhetorical Study of News Headlines Translation

News report has become an important source for people to obtain information, and as the “eye” of a piece of news, the title highly summarizes its theme, and expresses the attitude of the author. By analyzing the relevant literature, it is found that most of the current studies focus on the stylistic characteristics and translation principles of news translation. The studies on news headline translation are limited. Besides, the researches on the translation of news headlines mainly focus on the characteristics and specific translation methods. Few studies focus on rhetorical strategies of news headlines translation. Therefore, literature research and qualitative analysis will be adopted to study the translation of news headlines from the perspective of rhetoric. By selecting a certain amount of news headlines translation, to the paper explores the news headlines translation from the rhetoric appeals and a rhetorical model for guiding the translation of news headlines has been given. This study finds that the three rhetorical appeals have certain guiding significance for news headlines translation. In terms of ethos, the translator enhances the audience’s sense of credibility in the news by stating the views of authoritative people or platforms, or quoting the words in authoritative works; in terms of pathos, the translator takes “audience” as the center. Understanding the audience better and sharing common grounds with them is helpful to complete the persuasion to the audience; in terms of logos, the translator improves the language expressions and their internal logic so that the audience can be effectively persuaded. The rhetorical model put forward provides a new perspective for the translation of news headlines. In addition, this study expands the horizons of news translation research, and has certain reference significance for news translation practice.

Modelability of WAR metaphors across time in cross-national COVID-19 news translation: An insight into ideology manipulation

Previous studies have compared Covid metaphors across languages and national contexts, but seldom focus on the translation issue where news narratives of the same event may be different when translated for different readers. Another unexplored question is whether, and how, successive discursive observations across time in such narratives are related. To fill these gaps, this study employs the Box-Jenkins time series analysis (TSA) method to investigate whether and how WAR metaphor usage in Chinese-English COVID-19 news reports (source articles and their translations) can be fitted with ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) models. These reports come from three different sources across the year 2020: the Chinese Global Times (GT), the American New York Times (NYT) and the British The Economist (TE). Results show that WAR metaphors in the source news of GT and TE are modelable with an autoregressive and moving average model. However, no models were found to fit their translation counterparts. By contrast, WAR metaphors in both NYT’s source and translated news were not modelable. These differences are further qualitatively analyzed with examples in context. The study may contribute to the existing debates on WAR frames in COVID-19 discourse by adding a translation and TSA angle.

Whose voice is it? Evaluations of journalistic voices in news translation about the 2014 Hong Kong protests

Abstract Drawing on the notion of voice, this study examines both textual and contextual voices of translated news narratives relating to the 2014 Hong Kong protests. It analyses narrative voices, including those of primary, secondary and tertiary narrators, comparing the original and translated news texts and discusses the socio-cultural context in which these narrative voices are produced. The analysis draws on translated news reports published between 28 September and 16 December 2014 from three media outlets: Reference News, BBC Chinese and New York Times Chinese, together with their source texts from a range of mainstream global media. The findings show how the media outlets employ a complex interplay of narrative voices in their translated news texts and the extent to which the narrative voices of certain groups have been emphasised or suppressed. This sheds light on the shifts in voice within and between media outlets and the contextual factors which might have contributed to them.

A Study on the English Translation of Chinese News Headlines Under the Guidance of Communicative Translation

News headlines are the “eyes” of the news. Good news headlines play an important role in attracting readers and condensing news content. In the process of translating news, the translators need to pay more attention to translating the headlines. Under the guidance of communicative translation strategy, combining specific translation examples of news headlines, this article explores the English translation skills of Chinese news headlines. The researcher finally finds out that translators should make use of translation skills like word-to-word translation, amplification and adaptation flexibly, in order to make the translated versions of news headlines in line with the expressing habit of English.

A Brief Discussion on the Logic Problems in Chinese-English News Compilation: Taking China Daily as an Example

In recent years, Chinese government has emphasized the importance of strengthening China's communication ability and forming a discourse power equal to China's international status. China Daily is China's national English daily with an average circulation of more than 900,000 copies worldwide, serving as an important window for China's external publicity. The biggest problem faced by the translator during her working in China Daily is how to accurately translate Chinese news into English. Therefore, this paper is going to discusses how to improve Chinese-English news translation by using the method of case analysis. The case analysis materials in this paper are all from the author's English manuscripts when working in China Daily Website, involving the propaganda and economic development of local provinces and cities.

When fake news comes with translation: A study of perception toward coronavirus-related news translation into Thai

When fake news comes with translation: A study of perception toward coronavirus-related news translation into Thai

Literature Review of News Translation

Literature Review of News Translation

News Translation from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory in China Daily

Nowadays, with the trend of world political multi-polarization and the regional economic integration, international communication has become an essential way for the development of each country. News become indispensable to the public to acquire the information happened domestic and abroad everyday. Thus, accurate news translation based on different language backgrounds has become an important channel to get news. Give a broad overview of the current translation in China’s current situation, the research field has been expanded since the 70s of last century. However, relative researches still have a long way to go. Eugene Nida, a contemporary famous American theorist in the field of translation, his functional equivalence theory becomes a continuous improved theory which has great significance of guiding the news translation practice.This article mainly bases on Nida’s functional equivalence theory and combines with the news language features to analyze China's most representative newspaper- China Daily. By analyzing vocabulary, syntax and discourse, we could explore the application of Nida’s functional equivalence theory in guiding the practice of news translation. The study of Nida’s functional equivalence theory not only guides news translation but also instructs other translation practice. Nida’s functional equivalence theory is worthy of being studied.

Automatic identification and explanation of root causes on COVID-19 index anomalies

This paper reports a method for automatically identifying, analyzing and explaining anomalies in different indexes of COVID-19 crisis using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques. With systematic application of News sensor, language detection & translation, Keyword-based extraction of COVID-19 indexes, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based anomaly detection, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) based explanation methods, this paper demonstrates a methodological solution for strategic decision makers to make evidence-based policy decisions on COVID-19 (in multiple dimensions like Travel, Vaccine, Medical etc.). Firstly, COVID-19 related News is fetched from multiple sources in multiple languages. Then, AI-based language detection and translation process automatically translates these News and posts in real-time. Next, COVID-19 related News and posts are segregated in multiple groups using pre-defined keywords for creation of multiple indexes. Lastly, CNN based anomaly detection identifies all the anomalies on multiple COVID-19 indexes with NLP-based explanations. A standalone decision support system was developed that implemented the presented method. This decision support system allows a strategic decision-maker to comprehend “when, where, and why there are fluctuations in COVID-19 related sentiments on a particular dimension”. Method was validated with Tweets from 15/072021 to 24/05/2022 resulting in automated generation of 5 COVID-19 indexes and 69 anomalies with explanations.In summary, this method of anomaly detection on COVID-19 indexes presents:•An explicit, transferable and reproducible procedure for detecting anomalies on multiple indexes of COVID-19 in multiple languages•It helps a strategic decision maker to comprehend the root-causes of anomalies in COVID-19 related travel, vaccine, medical indexes•The solution developed using the presented method allows evidence-based strategic decision-making COVID-19 crisis using AI, Deep Learning and NLP

The Application of Relevance Theory in the Practice of Chinese Translation of English News

Since the proposal of Relevance Theory by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the application of Relevance Theory in a variety of fields has flourished. In the study of English news translation, the optimal relevance principles can guide translators’ translation behaviors and decisions to achieve successful translation and communication.

Category shift and its meaning shift in the translation of ANTARA news’ press releases

This research aimed to investigate the types, the most dominant types of category shifts, and meaning shifts that occurred in the category shift found in the English to the Indonesian press releases on ANTARA news. The descriptive qualitative was used to investigate the data. The theories were applied, namely Catford (1965) and Simatupang (2000). Furthermore, this research took three samples of the press releases on ANTARA news. The data were taken from looking at the official website of ANTARA news. Then, the data were put in the table consisting of SL and TL. After resolving the analysis of each category shift, the researcher found 306 data. Structure shifts occurred to the number of 139 data or 45 %, intra-system shifts were 85 data or 28 %, unit shifts were 72 data or 24 %, and class shifts occurred are 10 data or 3 %. The most dominant category shift was structure shift. Furthermore, the result of meaning shifts, there were 300 data or 98% for no meaning shift. The result of the specific to generic and vice versa as well as the cultural point of view had 3 data or 1% for each type.

Setting the cultural agenda for domestic readers: A corpus analysis of news translation in Culture Weekly

Drawing on the notion of cultural translation and agenda-setting theory, this study examines the role that translation plays in facilitating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication within the context of news translation. It is based on a case study ofCulture Weekly—a four-page section published every Monday inReference News, the most widely circulated daily newspaper in China. This study analyzes a comparable corpus of Chinese news articles fromCulture Weeklyand their English-language versions from various media outlets between February and March 2022. The study finds that the newspaper mainly used strategies of acculturation and literal translation and that it set the agenda for its domestic readers by highlighting particular cultural issues and disseminating certain cultural values. This case study provides insight into how news translation, as a form of recontextualization, strikes a delicate balance between accuracy and acceptability and how it mediates between source and target cultures within the institutional setting. The resulting translation reflects the editorial attitudes of the media outlet toward various cultural issues and manifests the relationship between the newspaper and its readership.

Translation as Rewriting: A Case Study of Al-Monitor News Headlines on Palestine

This study analyzes the English translations of Arabic news headlines covering Palestinian events on the Al-Monitor news website, which is a well-known multilingual platform that features reporting and analyses on the Middle East. Using a corpus of news headlines on Palestinian events published on Al-Monitor between October and December 2019, the study examines the translation procedures used in translating Arabic news headlines into English and their textual realizations. Drawing on the taxonomy of translation procedures, mainly Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995), the analysis shows that addition, deletion, modulation, and adaptation procedures were heavily drawn upon in the translation of news headlines into English. The target text translators frequently added, adapted, deleted, or altered the source text headlines to appropriate a preferred version of reality to their target audiences. The textual analysis further illustrates how texts work ideologically through a process of making accessible, certain aspects of reality and downplaying or excluding other aspects of it. The study argues that translators’ interventions are not simply an inevitable part of headline translation, but they can be seen in the context of the critical, mediatory role of news translation as a process of rewriting and reframing events. Thus, translators contribute to the appropriation of a specific representation of political reality congruent with the ideological, political, and institutional considerations within which translators operate and make sense of the world.

Equivalence and Translation Quality Assessment towards News Translation:

This study aims to determine the type of equivalence contained in the news translation of VICE Indonesia YouTube channel and its impact on the translation quality. The data was taken from the subtitle transcript of VICE Indonesia. This research is conducted with qualitative descriptive method. Several theories are elaborated within this research namely, Nida & Taber theory of equivalence (cited in Panou, 2013, p.2) and the equivalence theory of Baker (2018), and the adopted model of translation quality assessment from Nababan et al. (2012). The results of this study showed that there are six types of equivalence found within the subtitles: formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, equivalence at word level, equivalence above word level, grammatical equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence. Grammatical equivalence is the type that dominates the overall data. Furthermore, the findings shows that 66.67% of samples were categorized as less communicative, 58.33% of samples were evaluated as unacceptable translations, and 38.89% of the sample scored as high readability level.

Reporting at the border:Translation in periodicals at the Texas-Tamaulipas border during the 19th century

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the historical relationship between journalism and translation. It approaches translation history by considering journalistic translation as found in newspapers published in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (the southernmost, easternmost stretch of the Mexico-US border) during the 19th century. Specifically, the paper will ask whether translation was a tool employed in journalistic activity in the region and, if so, what the role was of translation in such activity. It will review the presence of translation in available border periodicals from the 1840s to the end of the century. This review will show that regarding certain aspects, historical news translation in this region was like that found in other places (e.g. a tool for importing foreign news). However, it will also highlight some traits that are the consequence of the newspapers being published along an essentially porous border where languages and cultures flowed into each other to create a specific bilingual context.

Translational phenomena in the news

Abstract Studies of news translation and indirect translation have challenged classical concepts of Translation Studies, but the two subfields have taken separate paths. This article applies Assis Rosa, Pięta, and Bueno Maia’s (2017b) classification of indirect translation to data collected via workplace studies conducted in two multilingual news agencies based in Switzerland and one monolingual broadcaster based in Canada. Illustrative examples are provided of the first six types of (in)direct translation in the classification. This typology allows for the inclusion of phenomena that may have been previously disregarded as translation, such as oral mediations and transfers from public-relations agencies to news agencies and other media outlets. However, news translation is a borderline case of translation that pushes Assis Rosa, Pięta, and Bueno Maia’s (2017b) classification to its limits because of the centrality of reported speech in news stories. Indirect translation seems to be able to bridge various subfields of Translation Studies.

News Translation in the light of Gatekeeping and Transediting: a case study on Euronews

Global dünyanın bireyleri arasında iletişim sağlama rolünü üstlenen haber, aynı zamanda farklı kültürler arasında iletişim kurma görevini de üstlenmektedir. 12 dilde haber sunan ve dünya çapında bir okur kitlesine sahip olan Euronews bu rolü üstlenen haber medyaları arasındadır. Çokdilli haber medyalarında bilgi akışı ve aktarımı önemli bir konumda yer almaktadır. Haber çevirisi son yıllarda pek çok çeviribilim araştırmacısının dikkatini çekmektedir. Haber çevirisi sürecini incelerken iki farklı kavramdan bahsetmek mümkündür: Eşik bekçiliği ve transediting. Eşik bekçiliği kavramı 1947 yılında Kurt Lewin’in çalışmaları sonucunda ortaya çıkıp sonrasında kitle iletişim literatüründe yerini almıştır. Lewin eşiği, “bir geçit, kanaldaki bir merciiyi karar alma noktası olarak değiştirebilme gücüne sahip bir alan” olarak tanımlar (Lewin, 1947). Eşik bekçisi farklı kaynaklardan iletilen haberleri değerlendiren ve “geçitten” (White, 1950) geçip geçmeyeceklerine karar veren kişi veya kuruldur. Transediting kavramı ise 1989 yılında Karen Stetting tarafından çeviri ve editing arasındaki belirsiz sınıra bir açıklama getirebilmek amacıyla ortaya konulmuştur (Stetting, 1989). Transediting’in uygulama alanlarının biri de haberciliktir. Çalışmamızda haber çevirisi üzerinde, eşik bekçiliği, transediting kavramlarını tanıtmaya ve Christian Nord’un dört işlev modelini uygulamaya çalışacağız. Christian Nord’un dört işlev modeline göre metni hedef kitlesine aktarmadan önce metnin işlevini belirlememiz gerekmektedir. Bu amaca ulaşmak için Nord 2006 yılında Karl Bühler ve Roman Jakobson’un ortaya koydukları modelleri baz alarak ilişkisel, anlatımsal, göndergesel ve duyumsal işlevlerden oluşan bir model ortaya koymuştur. Çalışmamızda Nord’un dört işlev modelinin açıklanmasının ardından Euronews haber medyasında 2015 yılından sonra yayınlanmış göç konulu Fransızca ve Türkçe haber örnekleri üç aşamalı bir analize tabi tutulacaktır. Öncelikle, örneklerin dört işlev modeli bağlamında başlık incelenmesi yapılacaktır sonra haber metninin bağlamından yola çıkarak metnin işlevi belirlenmeye çalışılacaktır. İncelemenin ikinci aşamasında transediting bağlamında haber metni örnek cümleler seçilerek incelenecektir. Eşik bekçiliği kavramının ışığında yapılacak üçüncü inceleme aşamasında, örneklerin alındığı haber kaynağının kısa bir tanıtımının ardından bakış açısı tanımlanmaya çalışılacak ve "geçitten" geçen ama farklılıklar gösteren örnekler üzerinden bulgular değerlendirilecektir. Çalışmamızın üç aşamalı analizinin sonucunda aynı haber medyası tarafından iki farklı kültür uzamında yer alan okur kitlelerine sunulan haberlerin nasıl aktarıldığı ve metinlerin hangi değişikliklere maruz kaldığını saptamayı amaçlamaktayız.

Unseen Policies in News Translation: A Study Investigating News Translators’ Practices and Strategies

This paper explores the institutional practices of translating news articles by focusing on ideological representations and editorial guidelines. It also investigates the steps adopted by news translators when transferring news articles with a slight focus on Arabic. The study uses surveys in a form of interviews and questionnaire, which were delivered to a range of journalists and news editors involved in translating news. Their input is qualitatively analysed to find out how translation operates and how ideologies impinge upon translation products in media institutions. The paper enhances our understanding of the role of translators who work within ideologically-driven institutions. In particular, it reveals that the editorial policies of news institutions are not always stated and can at times be hidden. Moreover, a news item can be intentionally altered and news sources can be blurred, so that readers are kept unaware that the target text is a translation from various sources.