This study examines agenda-setting in US-China elite newspapers coverage of COVID-19 through topic modeling. It attempts to contribute to studies of media agenda first by demonstrating the relevance of text-mining in agenda-setting research and second by comparing how elite newspapers from different countries choose topics as part of agenda-setting when they report a single event. Topic-modeling the news corpora collected between 15 January 2020 and 15 June 2020 from the four US-China elite newspapers, the study finds that "domestic economy" and "international relations" are the two dominant topics that help shape the agenda in the Chinese newspapers, whereas "family & friends" and "daily life" are the topics playing the same role in the US newspapers. The study argues that such differences may associate with ideological gaps between the two countries in terms of "concepts of development", "media bias" and "views of individualism".

This study investigates the extent to which English translations of Chinese Wuxia fiction and Western heroic literature in modern English are stylistically similar through stylometric analyses. It adds to literary translation research by highlighting possible stylistic connections between heroic literature in the East and that in the West, clues that may help understand the current reception of Wuxia translations. It also contributes to stylometric studies by introducing the stylistic panorama, a novel concept proposed to describe the stylistic picture of a (translated) text in a relatively holistic and functional way. Examining six English translations of Wuxia novels and twelve chivalric stories and heroic fantasies in modern English, the study finds that the Wuxia translations differ from the two Western subgenres in stylistic panoramas built by formal features (dispersion of word lengths and average sentence length), as well as the most frequent words (MFW) and the MFW-sequences. Such differences have foregrounded the unique stylistic features (richer Wuxia-specific vocabularies and shorter paragraph lengths) of these translations, which has contributed in part to their favorable reception among English-speaking readers. It is hoped that this study will encourage new applications for the concept of stylistic panoramas in future stylometric studies.

This research investigates the reception of English and French translations of Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels through sentiment analysis --- a text mining technique which helps uncover readers’ opinions of these translated literary works from their online reviews. The findings show that almost all of the published English/French versions of Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels are well received by readers in both languages in terms of fictional details like “character”, “plot” and “narratives”, despite there are some minor complains. These findings lead us to reflect on the current literary position of Wuxia translations in the English and French-speaking countries, where translated Wuxia works positioning as “Chinese literary classics” may partly help facilitate further reception of this type of traditional Chinese literature in the West.

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