摘 要

随着全球化的推进，《中国日报》作为使用英语的中国官方媒体越来越受到世界关注。而新闻中对人物的刻画影响着世界对中国生活和社会的认知。因此，本文以《中国日报》（英文版）为研究对象，主要选取2017年2月至4月人物特写新闻进行研究，并选择来自西方主流媒体的，内容相近或题材相同的人物特写新闻进行对比分析。研究发现，《中国日报》中的人物特写有自己的独特的风格，它的人物特写延续着中国惯有的写作习惯，虽然语言转变，但仍然有许多中国特有的传统语言风格，并且新闻基调平稳，不带有个人色彩，但同时它在句式上也借鉴了西方的写作标准，是中外文化交流下的重要结合物。它既值得借鉴，也有需要改进的地方，需要我们继续对标准英语进行研究，学习和使用。

关键词：《中国日报》；人物特写；中国传统；英语写作；英语新闻

Abstract

With the advancement of globalization, China Daily, as the Chinese English language medium, has attracted more and more attention from the world. And the characterization and depiction of characters from news influence world’s cognition of Chinese life and society. This paper selects profile news released from February to April in 2017 in China Daily (English Edition) as its research materials, and it compares them with foreign news from western mainstream media which have similar contents or same theme, trying to analyze their differences and similarities. The study finds that profiles in China Daily has their unique styles. Its feature writing adopts some Chinese writing customs and retains many Chinese traditional styles, though it uses a different language. And tone is stable, without personal opinions. However, it also borrows writing standards from the west, becoming a very important combination of Chinese and western writing styles. The study finds the meaning to learn from it and things that need to be improved. Therefore, we shall continue to study standard English to perfect Chinese people’s English writing.

Key Words: China Daily; profile; Chinese tradition; English writing; English news

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Characteristics of Chinese and English Profiles 3

2.1 Introduction to Profiles 3

2.2 Characteristics of Chinese Profiles 4

2.3 Characteristics of English profiles 5

3 Characteristics of Profiles in China Daily 6

3.1 Preferences in the selection of figures 6

3.1.1 Celebrities 6

3.1.2 Distinctive normal people 7

3.1.3 Foreign people who work in China 8

3.2 Linguistic features 9

3.2.1 Title designing 9

3.2.2 Addressing 10

3.2.3 Syntactic features 10

3.3 Ways of narration 12

3.3.1 Conversations and Talks 13

3.3.2 Narrative Order 14

3.3.3 Features of illustrations 15

4 Conclusion 17

References 19

Acknowledgements 20

A Study of Profiles in China Daily

1 Introduction

With the development of globalization, English has increasingly become an important tool for communication and trade between countries. At present, foreign demand for understanding China's national conditions and life is also increasing. Under such condition, China officially issued China Daily in 1981, intending to let the world better understand China. As for characters, the main reported object, a more detailed description could lead a deeper understanding for readers. Therefore, we need to seriously study profile. People who use English as its target readers, take up the majority of the whole population. However, there are many differences between Chinese and English, and Chinese people always add their own Chinese thinking and language usage habits when learn and use English. As a result, present Chinese English is developed.

Nowadays, scholars' research on Chinese English has been deepened, but it is still lacking in the areas of the application of Chinese English in specific literature style. Profile as an important part of news writing, its research value is seen as large. In order not to only improve the application of English and know more about potential development space, but also to help Chinese people to better study English in the future, the author decided to deeply study profile in China Daily. This study can not only let us better understand Chinese English, find out existing problems, and explore ways for improvement, but also find some common ground between western and Chinese culture and play a positive role in promoting the integration of different cultures. More importantly, deeply studying its characteristics including language aspect, content aspect or other aspects allows us to better seize media language, better understand the differences between Chinese English and Standard English, as well as to improve and perfect our own English writing. Therefore, better Chinese English articles can be created.

This paper focuses on profile in China Daily (English edition) from three aspects including figure’s selection, linguistic features and narrative styles. Under study, the author selected some typical profile news reported by China Daily from February to April in 2017 for detailed analysis and research, and meanwhile, found news with similar content or same theme from BBC, CNN, two of the foreign mainstream media to compare and analyze. As a result, their differences and similarities were found out, thus further study can be practiced better.

2 Characteristics of Chinese and English Profiles

China Daily is the combination after high degree of culture exchanges of China and western countries. Although reported in foreign languages, it after all, written by Chinese journalists. So, its language style neither completely copies western model, but also is different from Chinese traditional writing. In such case, only do people firstly have deep understandings of the characteristics of traditional Chinese and western profiles, can they better follow up subsequent study of profiles in China Daily. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the characteristics of Chinese and western profiles, to study and understand their differences.

2.1 Introduction to Profiles

In the past, profile doesn’t belong to the literary category, but a kind of shooting method in photograph. Later it became a special part in news writing. Profile, just as its name implies, is a kind of writing style that writers firmly grasp figures’ personality and features, and introduce them focused on different angles. The more vivid a figure’s personality and feature be, the more successful a piece of profile be. In profiles, all about a character's personality and characteristics, and his/her psychological activities, could be reflected by writing his/her own typical action, behavior or languages.

Profile as a very distinctive style of news, is characterized by reproduction and amplification. Journalists seize some special aspects of characters, and, highlight its details or parts in front of the readers. But fiction and exaggeration are not accepted.

An important prerequisite for person feature is that the author has a sufficient, thoroughly and clear understanding to reported persons. Only when life stories, thoughts and feelings, personality characteristics and habits are greatly known, and are accumulated a lot to be materials, is it possible for the writer to extract the most characteristic and expressive details and reveal the intrinsic nature of certain character. Furthermore, profile writing has huge requires for the use of language, including vivid, fresh and pictorial words.

Most of the research about profile based on Chinese news came from the 1950s to 1990s. It is probably because China's journalism was developing rapidly and the cognitive requirements to this field were increasing. Also, there were more and more meaningful figure news have been found and reported. Therefore, a good grasping of Chinese characteristics of writing is very important, too. After the 21st century, the political and economic exchanges between China and foreign countries became closer and closer, making the use of foreign language more and more frequent, so the study of foreign languages has become even more important. As a result, Chinese scholars have done a deeper research on English, especially English writing than before. But they are more inclined to study standard English, or ancient English, and ignore Chinese English which has long been formed for years and deserves to be studied.

2.2 Characteristics of Chinese Profiles

China's journalism is socialistic journalism, and thus the reported characters tend to heroes and models. Figure reports attach importance to the guidance and ideology, and pay much attention to the value orientation of Chinese society, so as to form positive and active or patriotic values, while individuals themselves are not that important. Thus, Chinese journalists focus more on digging out common things from the characters, and embody them in writing.

Chinese traditional way of thinking has great influence on character creation in writing. Chinese emphasis on abstract thinking, and such thinking reflects reporter's understanding to figures by summarizing contents and ignoring the appearance. Abstract thinking is shown in figure reports that the personal characteristics of figures may be conceptual strong subjective.