Bilingual News-----Take a look at the Corruption in China! (By Fok King Chui, Natalie)

      In this day and age, bilingualism is the most common thing that we encounter in our daily life. Using two or more languages is also ubiquitous in media discourse. According to “Bilingualism in the mass media and on the internet” written by Androutsopoulos, J, “language mixing is no doubt part of the symbolic capital that lifestyle magazines like Latina(the “Magazine for Hispanic Women”) and rap stars like N.O.R.E.(“Oye Mi Canto”) sell to their audiences. Beyond the US, music with bilingual lyrics thrived in the 1990s, ranging from Algerian rai to African hip-hop, from Bollywood soundtracks to Korean pop.” As a matter of fact, bilingualism does not only appear in magazines and popular music, it also emerges in news article.

    In this blog entry, I am going to analyse and comment on bilingual features of the news article titled “China’s Corrupt Media” authored by Zhu XueDong on 19^th September, 2014. (http://cmp.hku.hk/2014/09/19/36099/)

    In the first paragraph, the writer used the strategy of transliteration which “consists in representing the characters of a given script by the characters of another, while keeping the operation reversible.” (http://www.translitteration.com/what-is-transliteration/en/ ) The English name of the Chinese famous socialite, Guo Meimei and the Chinese prison escapee, Gao Yulun are the Pinyin and transliterate form of the Chinese name, 郭美美 and 高玉倫 respectively. Transliteration “enables the automatic and unambiguous recreation of the original text, which also known as retroconversion. In other words, the transliteration of a transliterated text should return the original text. If the source word means nothing in the given language, its transliterated form will also mean nothing, even though it will look like a word in that language as it will be written in its alphabet or syllabic system.” (http://www.translitteration.com/what-is-transliteration/en/)

     In the third paragraph of the news article and the caption under the cover of the magazine “China Weekly”, the writer used re-contextualization and translation. The writer translated and re-contextualized the headline of the April 2014 edition of the magazine “China Weekly”, “粗鄙時代” into the English term “Age of Corruption”. In fact, the Chinese term “粗鄙時代” is not the equivalent form of the English term “Age of Corruption”. The author here did not use literal translation but he translated only the meaning of the Chinese term. I guess this is because he wanted to tell the readers that we are now living in an age of corruption in China and thus he only translated the meaning of the term as this can express directly what he wanted to say. Moreover, since the writer wanted the concepts mentioned in the article to be more familiar for his target audience, he re-contextualized the term. Actually, re-contextualization is “a process that extracts text, signs or meaning from its original context in order to introduce it into another context. Since the meaning of texts and signs depend on their context, re-contextualization implies a change of meaning, and often of the communicative purpose too. It also refers to the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse or text-in-context to another.” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Recontextualization&defid=5956384 )

    

     Furthermore, in paragraph nine, the author also translated the English term into Chinese for re-contextualization. The term “venture capital investment” actually means “financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund earns money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology and IT.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital) The word “venture” has a meaning of “uncertainty and risky outcome.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/venture?s=t) However, he only translated the term into four Chinese words, “創業融資” in which the meaning of “uncertainty and risky outcome” was disappeared. This shows the utilization of re-contextualization in which the exact meaning of the text has been changed in order to be more suitable for the target audience.

      Last but not least, in the sixteenth paragraph, the writer re-wrote a new term called “headline party” which refers to “those online media who practice to fish for readers with the sensationalizing of headlines.”(http://cmp.hku.hk/2014/09/19/36099/) He also transliterated the term into Chinese Pinyin form, “biaotidang”. This is also a literal translation of sound while keeping the same meaning as the original text for the sake of cultural assimilation, “a process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society.”  (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/39328/assimilation)

     
     In conclusion, the writer has showed a lot of bilingual features in this news article, namely transliteration, translation, re-contextualization and cultural assimilation. I think the author did a great job in bilingualism and used many different examples to show the characteristics of bilingual concepts. By doing so, the news article can be acquired by people from different social divisions and cultural identities so as to achieve cultural bricolage successfully. Therefore, I would say technology facilitates “glocalisation” of news production across linguistic and cultural boundaries through social media.
 (By Fok King Chui, Natalie)