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ABSTRACT
Positioning, crucial in shaping the interpretation of a text, is usually unobtrusive in news translation. News translation of conflicts might provide an important context for investigating translators' mediation of (re)positioning, as the tension caused by opposing ideologies often requires translators to play complex and multi-faceted roles. Drawing on Appraisal Theory and Narrative Theory, this study follows the three-dimensional procedure of Critical Discourse Analysis and proposes an analytical framework for the examination of positioning in the news translation of the Tibet riots in 2008. A corpus analysis of 54 Chinese translated news reports and 129 English source texts reveals that, despite its advocacy of faithful translation, the Chinese state-run newspaper allows meticulous repositioning in actual practice. It is found that the relabelling strategy plays a crucial role in repositioning the target readers in their interpretation of the Tibet riots and their attitudes towards the participants in the conflicts. Factors that could motivate the translators' repositioning include the translators' institutional role and expectation for the target audience's reactions, the political stance of the news institution determined by its official identity, as well as the public narratives circulated by the Chinese and Western mainstream media.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 While the notion of being faithful is contested as there are different understandings of the concept of and criteria for faithful translation among practitioners and theorists, especially in the field of news translation (Pan, Citation2014), the advocacy of the news institution under investigation in the present study can be understood as a belief that the translations it produces are free from intervention or mediation.
2 As noted by Baker (Citation2006, p. 109), in any interaction, participants ‘take different positions in relation to the event and other participants (supportive, critical, disinterested, indifferent, uninformed outsider, committed)’. In this sense, positioning in the present study can be understood as the attitude or stance of participants towards the event or other participants involved in the event.
3 Generally, conflict refers to a violent situation between two or more parties that often arises from opposing ideologies and interests. In the present article, it refers to the Tibet riots that occurred in China in 2008.
4 International campaigns organized by exiled Tibetans and their supporters called for a boycott of the 2008 Olympics via media platforms such as Facebook.
5 Reference News is known to have the largest daily circulation in China (Pan, Citation2014).
6 This term is borrowed from Martin and White (Citation2005, p. 139) who used it to analyze the authorial voice advanced in the evaluative resources.
7 The self-positive and other-negative presentation is similar to the Ideological Square Model proposed by van Dijk (Citation1998, Citation2006), which accounts for actions of expressing/emphasizing information that is positive about us while suppressing/de-emphasizing information that is negative about us.
8 ST (04/17/2008, Guardian): in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. TT(04/19/2008): 在西藏，据估计死亡人数也只在22人至140人之间。
9 ST (05/21/2008, New York Times): An earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province killed tens of thousands of Chinese, evoking an outpouring of global sympathy for China and turning it overnight from victimizer to victim. TT (05/22/2008, RN): 中国四川省的地震令数万中国人丧生，激起各国人民对中国的同情，令它一夜之间变为受害者。
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Li Pan
Li Pan is a full professor in Translation Studies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS). She is also the director of the Center for Translation and Communication of GDUFS, a visiting academic scholar at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies of the University of Manchester as well as a researcher at the Center for Translation Studies of GDUFS. Her main research interests include news translation, discourse analysis of media translation and multimodal discourse analysis. Her recent articles have been published in Target, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel, Interpreting, The journal of Specialized Translation. She has been serving as a reviewer for several SSCI journals for years.
Sixin Liao
Sixin Liao is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia. Her main research interests include audiovisual translation and interpreting studies.