Bilingual translations of intensifiers in Dong-A Ilbo’s news about China: A corpus-based discourse analysis approach

Abstract

Drawing on the framework of Ideological Square Model, this paper carries out a corpus-based analysis of the ways in which group relations and the image of China are re-shaped in the English translation (ET) and the Chinese translation (CT) of Korean news discourse about China with intensifiers as an entry of inquiry. The results show that (1) There is a statistically significant difference regarding faithfulness between the ET and the CT of intensifiers (χ2 = 38.11>3.84, p<0.05), with the ET having more translation shifts. Additionally, the Chi-square test of a 3x3 contingency table (T = 49.77>5.99, P<0.05) indicates that there is a difference between the distribution of translation shifts at the 3 levels between ET and CT. (2) The ET of Korean news about China aligns more closely with van Dijk’s ideological square model, while CT violates. It is argued that South Korean media have ideological factors to consider when it comes to Chinese readers accepting CT. (3) There is an alteration of the ideological square model in the target texts. The results indicate that in the translation of a target language, the translation propensity for relevant topics of the target country in which the language is spoken obeys the rules of “Us”, the ingroup, but not “them”, the outgroup.