This paper aims at exploring the interface between journalistic translation and news discourse to formulate an explicative translation-oriented news discourse with a view to making a detailed analysis of the source news texts and to constructing a common ground against which the news genres of the source and target languages could be contrasted.
News reporting is a special discourse with its own conventional content and form, exploiting socio-cultural ideologies as its interpretative framework (van Dijk 1985, 1986, 1988; Fowler 1991; Pan and Kosicki 1993; Fairclough 1995). Accordingly, a comprehensive new discourse analysis is indispensably necessary for translators to sufficiently appreciate such highly culture-bound text and to make acceptable and readable translations.
The translation-discourse relation has been elaborately investigated by Hatim and Manson (1990) and Trosborg (2002). The former provides an exhaustive account in terms of communicative transaction (i.e. register analysis), pragmatic action and semiotic interaction. The latter sets up some contextual variables: (1) context of situation, (2) tenor, field and mode of genre and (3) ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of text. However, their work is concerned with the correlation between translation activities and discourse in general rather than specific discourses such as news discourse. In contrast, several linguists and scholars of journalism have probed deeply into news discourse with different approaches: van Dijk's (1983, 1985, 1986, 1988) social-cognitive model; Bell's (1991) structural analysis, Fowler's (1991) Critical Linguistics, Pan and Kosicki's (1992) frame analysis and Fairclough's (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis. Built upon the forgoing studies, this paper will examine how news discourse interacts with journalistic translation and what is the result of this interaction.
Previous research on news discourse and the translation-discourse relation will be reviewed first. Then the relevance of news discourse to journalistic translation as well as their interaction will be deeply addressed. Lastly, a translation-oriented news discourse will be formulated.