Point of view and citation: Fourteen Chinese and English versions of the ‛same’ news story

Abstract

Fourteen versions ofthe same news story, a Xinhua release about Li Peng's meeting wifh George Bush, were selectedfor comparison front eleven Hong Kong newspapers and three from the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Four are English language newspapers and the rest Chinese. Comparison of five features including switches in point of view, lamination, ambiguous quotation, bylining of a named reporter, andmention ofsetting in the lead revealed dijferences between English and Chinese texts in the structuring of the point of view of quoted newsmakers and in the citation of original sources. While the English language texts diverged most widely from theRenmin Ribao Version, no single feature or combination of features could be used to distinguish a Chinese text from an English one. Two Chinese language papers that based their stories on a Reuter and Agence France Presse release differed in significant ways from the others, and the China Daily, a Chinese Communist Party organ published in English, uses unambiguous direct and indirect quotation, unlike the Renmin Ribao, also a government paper. These papers also differ in bylining practices. The clearest result ofthe study is that the quotation ofthe speech ofothers is a highly ambiguous matter in Chinese, while English journalists present the speech of newsmakers äs unambiguous direct quotation.

The alignment of generic discourse units in news stories

“…The inverted pyramid is frequently referred to as the most common structure of English news reports in the press (as in Ferry 2006;Readership Institute 2004Scollon and Scollon 1997;Sternadori 2008;Thomson et al 2008). According to Readership Institute (2010), newspapers in the United States use the inverted pyramid style for 69 percent of all stories.…”

Rethinking Reader and Writer Responsibility in Academic English

“…The fourth part, the conclusion, need not be decisive, but can indicate a doubt or ask a question. Hinds (1983) gives examples of Japanese newspaper editorials using this structure being translated sentence by sentence for the English version of the paper, and Scollon and Scollon (1997) show how this structure is used in both Chinese and English-language newspapers in Hong Kong, so it cannot be dependent on anything inherent to the linguistic or cognitive structures of a given language. Hinds (1987) describes this form of writing as "reader-responsible": it is the reader who has to make an effort and use inductive logic to provide the transitions and logical links between the sentences and paragraphs, unlike in "writerresponsible" cultures (such as the US and the UK) in which readers expect writers to use coherence devices and textual transitions to render explicit the connections between arguments.…”

A flexible approach to natural language generation for disabled children

“…Although these are parts of a news text, they are not the article proper, on which we annotate rhetorical relations. 7 After a comparative study on the rhetorical structure of news published by some Hong Kong newspapers in both English and Chinese, Scollon and Scollon (1997) observed that "quotation is at best ambiguous in Chinese. No standard practice has been observed across newspapers in this set and even within a newspaper, it is not obvious which portions of the text are attributed to whom."…”