Same Perspectives, Different Effects: Financial News Translation under the
Impact of Politics
Nancy Xiuzhi Liu
School of International Communications, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Framing the story of the Chinese economy sometimes sends out controversial
messages from China and the western media. The Chinese media prefers positive
coverage of a promising economy while its counterparts tend to paint a rather gloomy
picture. The differentiated framing effects also find its expression in translated news.
Being an essential part of media translation, financial news translation is not just a
linguistic transfer of figures and facts, but is closely related to economy and society
as a whole. Telling the same story through translation in different languages presents
choices similar to those faced in framing stories from different angles in journalism.
Taking financial news carried on the Reference News and the Financial Times
Chinese, two leading newspapers that publish translated news in China as samples of
analyses, this paper argues that the two disciplines can be integrated in the study of
news translation on the account that translated news manifests the frames in terms of
responsibility, conflict, interest, etc. in the same manner as framing news stories in
the media. Through the integration, political causes behind transfer or transformation
of translation mediated stories can be revealed by looking into framing effects of
some issues under different contexts.
Key words: framing; politics, financial news; translation;
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Email: nancy.liu@nottingham.edu.cn