The Rhetorical Communication of Identification Theory in the Translation of Chinese News into English

Abstract

To further understand the external news publicity effect of mainland media, the open-source data mining platform Social Bearing is applied to collect data of China’s 2021 Two Sessions on Twitter platform and relevant reports of the official accounts of Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network and People’s Daily, together with reports on 2020 Two Sessions. It is found that the topics chosen by mainland media are different from that of the Western media, and the acceptance of the reports of the three central mainland media in foreign readers is not remarkably high. Based on this research, this paper applied Kenneth Burke’s identification theory into news translation practice. It shows four translation approaches such as literal translation, amplification, omission, and adaptation can be used in the process of news translation to achieve narrative identification. Results of this study have some significance to translation for China’s global communication.