A comparative analysis of English-Chinese translation approaches taken by news agencies in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore

• Main Author: Nam, Yunzhou
• Other Authors: Helena Gao Hong
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/72419
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Accurately handling translations is a crucial task for those who work in the news profession. For the same source quotes, different news agencies could still produce different translations, resulting in differences in the information being disseminated to readers. This study compared news agencies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore on how their translations differed, and made an attempt to identify areas in which news agencies often encountered difficulties when carrying out English-Chinese translations. The study was also carried out to determine whether these difficulties were in any way linked to the political sensitivity of the news stories themselves. Three research questions were raised on the difficulties encountered by translators, how translators approached these difficulties, and how the accuracy, completeness and style of translations increased together with political sensitiveness. For further examination, an hypothesis was proposed that accuracy and completeness ratings would be higher as political sensitiveness increased. Translations were rated on their accuracy, completeness and style, before comparing these ratings against the levels of political sensitiveness of the news stories vis-à-vis each country or region. The research questions were all answered based on the findings. However, the hypothesis was only partially proven true, as the findings showed that news agencies tended to produce better translations for news stories with high political sensitiveness, though not necessarily for the most sensitive ones. News agencies also displayed greater sensitivity in handling news stories that were more politically sensitive, though this did not definitively result in better translations. Other findings of this study included the challenges in translation posed by the emergence of social media postings as a direct news source. These findings would help news agencies to be aware of potential shortcomings, rectify them and work to produce translations of even higher quality. Keywords: news, translation quality, political sensitivity, translation strategy