Representations of the 2014 Hong Kong protests in journalistic translation: A corpus-based critical framing analysis of Chinese and English news coverage

Abstract

This article focuses on the 2014 Hong Kong protests (also known as the Occupy Central or the Umbrella Movement), which have been one of the most high-profile socio-political incidents since the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997. It investigates how the protests were represented in the translated Chinese-language news produced by selected media from China, the UK and the US, and how these news articles were ‘reframed’ ( Baker, 2006 ) from their original English versions. The study proposes an analytical framework of corpus-based critical framing analysis, which combines critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis and framing analysis. It identifies some prominent news frames and several consistent framing patterns in the coverage of the protests: Reference News mainly adopts government and public frames and textual strategies of addition and omission; BBC Chinese employs social action and process frames, as well as a combination of framing strategies and devices at the textual, intratextual and paratextual levels; The New York Times Chinese (re)frames the events mostly through individual and geographical frames, and paratextual devices of news headlines and images. These news frames and framing patterns demonstrate the distinct political stances held by the media outlets towards the events.

Editorial: Translation and interpreting as communication: necessity and significance of studies about translated and interpreted communication

“…As part of this trend of more interdisciplinary and outwardlooking research, scholars have examined the role of translators and interpreters in communicating information bilingually and multilingually, disseminating knowledge, (re)constructing discourses and narratives, and indexing sociopolitical identities and enacting realities in various historical (Lung, 2006;Guo, 2015;Wang and Xu, 2016;Wolf, 2016;Cui, 2021;Rodríguez-Espinosa, 2022), institutional (Schäffner, 2012;Wang, 2012;Beaton-Thome, 2013;Li, 2018;Wang and Feng, 2018;Fu and Chen, 2019;Gu, 2019Gu, , 2022aGu and Tipton, 2020;Gu and Wang, 2021;Li and Hu, 2021;Hu and Li, 2022), cultural (Conway, 2015); sociopolitical (Baker, 2006;Harding, 2011;Munday, 2012), diplomatic (Gao, 2021;Gao and Munday, 2022), media and journalistic (Orengo, 2005;Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009;van Doorslaer, 2009;Kang, 2014;Pan, 2014;Liu, 2017;Gu, 2018;Qin and Zhang, 2018;Filmer, 2019;Riggs, 2019;Valdeón, 2021;Zanettin, 2021;Zeng and Li, 2021;Kamyanets, 2022;Ping, 2022), public services (Wadensjö, 1...…”