Presenting America through the translation gate : a case study of Reference News on the WeChat public account platform

Abstract

Translation has rarely been the analytical focus in communication and journalism studies, which might be ascribed to an outdated understanding of the term “translation.” This study highlighted the crucial role of the translation gate in curating news narratives. It adopts an extended conceptualization of journalistic translation, which considers translation in news production as a two-level gatekeeping practice. Specifically, this study aimed to investigate translation’s gatekeeping function at the macro level. To this end, popular translated news reports covering the United States posted in 2020 on the WeChat account of an official Chinese media outlet, Reference News (RN), were collected. By employing content analysis, this study scrutinized the sources used, topics covered, and story tones of the collected reports. The findings indicate that RN exhibited a preference for established and pro-China media sources in covering the United States. The topics in the examined reports were mostly hard news with a few instances of soft news. While the majority of news reports were negative, positive stories were also identified, demonstrating RN’s efforts to disseminate constructive journalism.