The growing interest in news translation in the last decade has raised issues regarding the nature of news translation itself, leading to a shift away from the traditional concept of equivalence between source text (ST) and target text (TT) to an interest in the role of journalistic conventions in the process. This article examines variation in the stance adopted in translation between Western press reports (in English) and Reference News (Chinese in pinyin: Cancao Xiaoxi) and argues, on the basis of frame analysis of 27 pairs of news reports on the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute, that news translation of controversial issues is a process in which the stance framed in the original news report is reframed for the target culture. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study identifies three prominent types of framing variationsappropriation variation, labeling variation, and ambiguity variationand examines their respective roles in reframing the stance toward a pro-China and often anti-Japan direction in the translation by Reference News.