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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 61:3 (2015) ► pp.394–410

Translating political ideology

A case study of the Chinese translations of the English news headlines concerning South China Sea disputes on the website of www.ftchinese.com

Ideology is a major issue in Translation Studies. With a case study of the Chinese translations of English news headlines concerning the South China Sea disputes on the website of www.ftchinese.com, this paper attempts to provide insights into the translation of ideologies in news in the Chinese context. In the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, the ideological factors underlying the disparity between the English news headlines and their Chinese translations are explored. The three-dimensional model of analysis put forward by Fairclough is modified and adopted in this paper as the basic steps of analysis: firstly, describe the differences between the original and their translations; secondly, associate them with the social reality; finally, account for those differences. In addition, to demonstrate how translators maneuvered to reach a compromise with the antagonistic ideologies which may set difficulties either for the news to win the acceptance of Chinese online readers or pass the Chinese government censorship, this paper offers an analysis of the translation strategies adopted in those Chinese translations, such as substitution, omission as well as the more subtle strategies, including changes of modality and actor. It is found that in the Chinese translations of the English news headlines, translators’ priority is on producing translations suitable to target readers and censors' ideology, rather than linguistic equivalents. Therefore, translating ideology-loaded texts adds a new way to understand translation and ideological explorations in Translation Studies have great potentials.

Keywords: news headlines, translation, ideology, critical discourse analysis
Published online: 15 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.61.3.05gua
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