Article published in:
Transnational Image Building: Linking up Translation Studies, Reception Studies and Imagology
Edited by Paola Gentile, Fruzsina Kovács and Marike van der Watt
[Translation Spaces 10:1] 2021
► pp. 138–160

Translating images of Hong Kong in news coverage on BBC Chinese

A corpus-based critical discourse study

| Hangzhou Dianzi University Hangzhou Dianzi University
This study investigates how the image of Hong Kong is presented in translated news in the case of the 2014 protests, adopting an imagological approach. The corpus consists of translated news articles on the BBC Chinese website and their English-language source texts from a variety of British press articles published between 28 September and 15 December 2014. The study is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis focusing on aspects of the labelling and semantic prosodies in relation to Hong Kong. It also assesses aspects of image-building, including the selective appropriation of texts for translation, the institutional procedures, and target readership reception, that together contribute to the discursive construction of socio-political images of Hong Kong.
Keywords: imagology, news translation, selection, reception, corpus, Hong Kong, protest, BBC Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Imagological approach to news translation research
  • 3.Corpus-based critical discourse analysis
  • 4.BBC Chinese
  • 5.Corpus and methodology
  • 6.Contextual analysis of news selection, production and reception
    • 6.1Selective appropriation of news sources
    • 6.2Institutional news production procedures
    • 6.3Target readership of news products
  • 7.Corpus analysis of news discourses on Hong Kong
    • 7.1Labelling of Hong Kong
    • 7.2Semantic prosodies of Hong Kong
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.20015.pin
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