Study on Paratextual Elements in News Transediting: A Case Study on the Transediting Strategies in Reference News

Reference News is a state-owned news platform that provides foreign opinions to average Chinese readers. As the only Chinese news platform eligible for publishing articles from the foreign press, it serves as a “corpus” to study news transediting strategies in the context of China. This paper selects sources related to the COVID-19 pandemic from Reference News and compares the sources with the transedited articles. The author upholds there are three main paratexts guiding the process of transediting pandemic-themed articles on Reference News : reader’s value and horizon of expectations, ideology and national emotions, and national interests. It can be concluded that, under the influence of those three paratexts, Reference News generally prefers to use four strategies to transedit relevant articles, namely the selection and combination of sources, deletion, addition, and variation. The author hopes that, given the significance and popularity of pandemic-related information and opinions, this paper can enlighten future research on transediting news articles about COVID-19.