This article studies some of the framing strategies mentioned in extant literature in the Chinese and English versions of news reports on the Edward Snowden case. It analyses a bilingual corpus of 47 news texts in each language. Both the English and Chinese data were collected from Chinese state-owned news agencies. The research results show that even though the news agency that produced the translated news shares the same ideology as the news organization that provided the Chinese news, the translated narratives of the incident were often reframed. We argue that the possible factors that affect the reframing of the narrative include the target readership, the political situation and the political position of the news agency. We also argue that applying a narrative account may help to better explore stance variation in sensitive news translation.