Translation or transformation? A case study of language and ideology in the Taiwanese press

Abstract

Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, this study analyzes and discusses the news report related to Taiwan’s first lady Wu Shuchen’s interview with the media which appeared in two ideologically opposed newspapers, i.e. the pro-reunification United Daily News and the pro-independence Liberty Times. Both news articles are translated from an identical English text. However, based on analysis of headlines, editorial deletion and addition, syntactic and lexical variations, as well as stylistic differences in paragraph/thematic combination, we have found that noticeable changes are made by the two translated Chinese versions. We argue that these transformations and differences found in the two Chinese texts are not arbitrary, but rather are ideologically motivated, that is, they reflect and construct the underlying opposed ideologies between the two newspapers.

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