Representations of the 2014 Hong Kong protests in news translation

This chapter seeks to investigate how the 2014 Hong Kong protests are represented in the translations of news articles published in selected media outlets, including Reference News (RN) from the Chinese mainland, EJ Insight from Hong Kong, BBC Chinese from the United Kingdom and the New York Times (NYT) Chinese from the United States. The news corpus is composed of English and Chinese news articles on the 2014 Hong Kong protests from the selected media outlets and their original pieces which are released in a range of mainstream news media. This study adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach in comparing the keywords, concordances and collocations of the original news discourses with those of their translated versions, and more importantly, between the translated news discourses produced by the different media outlets. It considers the contrastive differences between source and target language conventions and pays particular attention to the shifts that occurred during the translation process which are related to the ideological stances of the media outlets.