Advances in Discourse Analysis of Translation and Interpreting

Linking Linguistic Approaches with Socio-cultural Interpretation

Binhua Wang, Jeremy Munday, Binhua Wang, Jeremy Munday

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000179088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This edited thematic collection features latest developments of discourse analysis in translation and interpreting studies. It investigates the process of how cultural and ideological intervention is conducted in translation and interpreting using a wide array of discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistic approaches and drawing on empirical data from the Chinese context. The book is divided into four main sections: I. uncovering positioning and ideology in interpreting and translation, II. linking linguistic approach with socio-cultural interpretation, III. discourse analysis into news translation and IV. analysis of multimodal and intersemiotic discourse in translation.

The different approaches to discourse analysis provide a much-needed contribution to the field of translation and interpreting studies. This combination of discourse analysis and corpus analysis demonstrates the interconnectedness of these fields and offers a rich source of conceptual and methodological tools.

This book will appeal to scholars and research students in translation and interpreting studies, cross-linguistic discourse analysis and Chinese studies.

Part I
Uncovering positioning and ideology in translation and interpreting

1
Presentation, re-presentation and perception of China’s political discourse

An analysis about core concepts on the ‘Belt and Road’ based on a comparable corpus

Binhua Wang

Introduction

The important role of translation and interpreting (T&I), in particular the process of re-contextualisation, has remained under-explored in political discourse studies, which has “led to the assumption that information can circulate unaltered across different linguistic communities and cultures” (Bielsa 2009: 14). According to Pérez-González (2012), the reasons for such a phenomenon lie in the following two aspects: On the one hand, the tendency of global media analysts to concentrate on the advantages of the monolingual strategy adopted by powerful Anglophone media corporations (including the instantaneity in the processes of information dissemination) has “obscured the complexities involved in overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers, and made the role of translation in global communications invisible” (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 18). On the other hand, there are widespread social misconceptions about T&I which perceive T&I only as a routine and uncritical equivalence-matching process while power differentials between the parties involved in the production and negotiation of meaning are often viewed erroneously as being invariable in T&I (Pérez-González 2012: 172).

Meanwhile, in the field of translation studies, a noteworthy development is the conceptualisation of T&I as socially situated activities and translators and interpreters as agents of not only linguistic and communicative mediation but also cultural and ideological mediation (e.g. Inghilleri 2003). After the emergence of the linguistic school of translation studies from the 1950s to the 1980s that centred on the concept of ‘equivalence’ between the source text and the target text, there followed the “cultural turn” in the 1990s that expanded its scope of research to include cultural aspects. In the past decade the discipline has shown increasing awareness of the need to adopt a more critical stance towards the relationship between discursive practices and their social embedding, which is labelled by some scholars as the “social turn” (e.g. Wolf 2006; Angelelli 2012), and particularly the role of power in discursive practice, which is proposed by Tymoczko and Gentzler (2002) as the “power turn”. Such a perspective is also articulated by Baker (2006: 322), who argues that

it is far more productive to examine contextualisation as a dynamic process of negotiation and one that is constrained by the uneven distribution of power which characterizes all exchanges in society, including those that are mediated by translators and interpreters.

While the cultural turn and the social turn have successfully expanded the horizon of translation studies from linguistic analysis at the micro-level to socio-cultural and ideological analysis at the macro-level, the following issues remain to be further explored: (1) How may micro-analysis be linked to macro-analysis of the context, to the role of translators and interpreters and to the function of T&I in society and international communication? 2) How may socio-cultural studies be better validated with linguistic, textual and discourse analysis? A notable recent development in translation studies is the effort to link linguistic and discourse analysis with socio-cultural and ideological interpretations, which is represented by the special issue of the Target journal on “discourse analysis in translation studies” (Munday and Zhang 2015). Translation “presents a fertile research area for comparative or multilingual Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)” (Al-Hejin 2012: 312). Chilton (2004: xii) has already alluded to that potential, stating that translation “pose[s] more intriguing, and politically urgent, challenges for scholars in a world that is both more global and more fragmented”. As Schäffner (2004: 145) also suggests, translations can function as part of wider strategic functions of political language, which she identifies as: coercion, resistance, dissimulation and (de)legitimation. CDA, whose explicit aim is to “make the ideological loading of particular ways of using language and the relations of power which underlie them more visible” (Wodak and Fairclough 1997: 258), may provide a better understanding of the translation of ideology by elucidating the way discourse shapes and is shaped by ideology (Hatim and Mason 1997: 119).

Most political discourse research has been conducted from the perspectives of political science, communication studies, rhetoric studies, pragmatics, socio-linguistics and discourse analysis. While useful research findings have been produced from those perspectives, the understanding of translated/interpreted political discourse is quite limited because an important factor has often been neglected: the role of translators and interpreters as “unknown agents in translated political discourse” (Schäffner 2004, 2012) and in re-contextualising political discourse for international audiences.

As seen from the perspective of interpreting and translation studies, the presentation, re-presentation and perception of political discourse is not only a site for interlingual, cross-cultural and international communication but also a venue for re-contextualisation and manipulation of values, power and ideology.

This chapter will examine how Chinese political concepts presented by the Chinese government are re-contextualized in English with the presentation, representation and perception of the discourse on the ‘Belt and Road’. The Belt and Road is a grand scheme initially proposed by President Xi Jinping of China in late 2013 to revive the Silk Road on both land and sea, which is not only central in China’s development agenda and promotion of its influence and soft power but also relevant to many other countries in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Belt and Road has become a core concept in China’s political and economic agenda during the past few years. As it involves huge investment of billions of dollars and lots of development projects along the routes of the Belt and Road, it is also meaningful to many other countries. However, it seems that the process of international communication about its concepts and implementation plans has not been an easy one. For example, CNN in the United States asked in the title of its news report about ‘One Belt and One Road’ in 2017: “Just what is the One Belt, One Road thing anyway?”.¹ The Xinhua News Agency in China also asked in 2015: “Will poor translation mislead China’s Silk Road initiative?”² Both point to the confusion over the core concepts about the Belt and Road in their re-presentation and perception in international communication.

Therefore, it will be interesting to examine how the Belt and Road is presented in the original Chinese discourse, re-presented in English translation and perceived by Western media. It will also be interesting to see whether and how the perceptions by Western media have changed during the past few years. In this chapter, two sets of research questions will be explored as follows: (a) How is the B&R labelled in the Chinese government’s presented discourse and its represented discourse through institutional translation? How is it labelled in the perceived discourse by English media? (b) Is the image of the B&R constructed in the perceived discourse the same as in the re-presented discourse? If different, how is the image of the B&R constructed differently in the perceived discourse with discoursal resources?

Data and methodology

Data: A comparable corpus of discourse on the Belt and Road

In order to examine these research questions, a comparable corpus of discourse on the Belt and Road (B&R) was built on the corpus platform of Sketch Engine,³ which includes the following two sub-corpora:

1. The “Sub-corpus of China’s Translated Discourse on B&R in 2015–2018” (abbreviated as “CD on B&R”), which includes seven addresses and statements presented by top officials of the Chinese government on the Belt and Road published between 2015 and 2018 on the websites of www.china.org.cn and www.xinhuanet.com, two official portals of the Chinese government for publishing its policies. All the addresses and statements were translated (or represented in English) by its institutional staff translators. POS-tagged in the Sketch Engine, the size of the sub-corpus of “CD on B&R” is 29,054 words 2 The “Sub-corpus of The Economist on B&R in 2015–2018” (abbreviated as
2. “TE on B&R”), including 26 articles on the Belt and Road published between and 2018 in The Economist, an English-language weekly magazine-format newspaper published in the UK with a circulation of 1.5 million worldwide that ‘offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connections between them’,⁴ which makes it representative among Western media. Parts of speech (POS)-tagged in the Sketch Engine, the size of the sub-corpus of “TE on B&R” is 30,219 words

Information about the texts collected for the comparable corpus in summarised in Table 1.1. As can be seen from the table, both sub-corpora comprise texts on the same subject matter, that is the ‘B&R’ and their corpus sizes are nearly the same, which means the two sub-corpora are comparable.

Table 1.1 The comparable corpus of discourse on the Belt and Road

Sub-corpora	Corpus size	Texts collected for the corpora
“CD on B&R”	29,054 words	2015: NDRC, action plan on the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative; 2015: President Xi Jiping, speech at the Bo’ao Forum for Asia; 2015: State Councillor Yang Jiechi, the session of “Jointly Building the 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road” in Bo’ao Forum for Asia; 2016: Chairman of the National People’s Congress Zhang Dejiang, speech at the Belt and Road Forum in HK; 2017: President Xi Jinping, speech at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting; 2017: President Xi Jinping, opening speech of The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation; 2018: Foreign Minister Wang Yi, press conference after the ‘Two Sessions’
“TE on B&R”	30,219 words	2015: Five articles related to the B&R, e.g., “Where all Silk Roads lead”, etc. 2016: Five articles related to the B&R, e.g., “Foreign ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Uncovering positioning and ideology in translation and interpreting
• Part II Linking linguistic analysis with socio-cultural interpretation
• Part III Discourse analysis of news translation
• Part IV Analysis of multimodal and intersemiotic discourse in translation
• Index