Translating Political Journalism Articles in Contemporary China: Intertextuality and Ideology

The message in a political journalism article is conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation. When such a text is translated, complicated intertextual relations are developed and established at both textual and contextual levels. For example, a “horizontal” textual relationship exists between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), and a “vertical” contextual relationship between the TT and its socio-political environment. Nevertheless, the production of the TT does not only lie in TT’s context, but also other factors such as the ST writer’s linguistic choices, TT writer’s interpretation of the political event being reported, the media’s stances and the purposes of translation and publication, as well as the intertextual exchanges among these elements.

This paper aims to examine how an ST and a TT interact both with each other and with their respective socio-political environments, as well as how their intertextual exchanges at textual and contextual levels influence the production of the translation. The paper will begin with an account of these various intertextual relations, before moving on to consider the mediation role that intertextual factors (both linguistic and extra-linguistic) play in the discursive practice of translation. The paper will explore these issues through an analysis of a piece of political journalism and its Chinese translation. It concludes with reflections on the ways in which power relations and competing ideologies are played out at the textual level in the translation.