Translating images of Hong Kong in news coverage on BBC Chinese

Abstract

This study investigates how the image of Hong Kong is presented in translated news in the case of the 2014 protests, adopting an imagological approach. The corpus consists of translated news articles on the BBC Chinese website and their English-language source texts from a variety of British press articles published between 28 September and 15 December 2014. The study is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis focusing on aspects of the labelling and semantic prosodies in relation to Hong Kong. It also assesses aspects of image-building, including the selective appropriation of texts for translation, the institutional procedures, and target readership reception, that together contribute to the discursive construction of socio-political images of Hong Kong.