The political dialectics of transediting: the case of Reference News

The aim of this article is two-fold. On the one hand, it will discuss the evolution of China's Reference News within the historical dialectics of Chinese politics. Reference News is a unique newspaper in the world's news media industry, dedicated solely to transediting international news reports for Chinese readers. A Chinese-style political dialectics is found in the newspaper's original mandate to truthfully inform the Chinese communist leadership through faithful translation. That dialectics changes, however, with the changes in the status and role of Reference News, shaped and defined by national conditions and international relations, posing challenges to the newspaper that has to strike a balance between dutifully importing WesternFootnote1 perspectives and narratives and having to be politically correct and constructive. On the other hand, it aims to examine a number of cases to analyse the ways in which the newspaper employs various transediting strategies that highlight the features of the newspaper within that changing dialectics of China's politics and Reference News as an example of antithesis.