Ideological Mediation: Metaphor Shifts in Translating the Communist Party of China’s Centenary Speech

Abstract

Under the guidance of Ideological Square Model, this paper conducts a critical metaphor analysis of the metaphor shifts in translating the Communist Party of China’s centenary speech. The results demonstrate that (1) six types of metaphors are identified in the ST and while all the types are kept, shifts do occur in the TT; (2) cultural considerations and linguistic representations engendering the metaphor shifts are subjugated to and mediated by the ideological kernel of presenting a desired CPC Self-image; (3) the Chinese traditional philosophy of He (harmony) is a feasible complement to the Ideological Square Model in making sense of particular metaphor shifts in translating Chinese political discourse into a foreign language. The study observes that Chinese political translation is often institutional translation. It is argued that metaphor shifts, in this translation context, are ideologically motivated, culturally mediated, and linguistically configured collective endeavours. Chinese political translation, as compared to the traditional view of translation as an ST-bound transference, is an ideologically determined, source-philosophy-channelled, and image-building-oriented verbal activity that conforms to China’s national interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaphor shifts
• metaphor translation
• ideological square model
• CPC’S centenary speech
• Chinese political discourse
• institutional translation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An official Chinese translation team primarily consists of professional translators who are CPC members (Li and Li 2015) and international experts (i.e. qualified native speakers of the target language) responsible for proofreading (Li 2021). To ensure translation correctness and quality, official Chinese translation institutions put much emphasis on in-service training. For example, the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau has developed an advanced study scheme that includes workshops and seminars on politics and translation (Teng and Wu 2015). Political discourses are translated following stringent procedures, which involve preliminary translation, proofreading, and finalizing (Cheng 2002).

2 The full text of the English version was retrieved from Press Center for the Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China (http://www.100cpcnews.cn/english/n101/2021/0701/c89-442.html), on October 5, 2021.

3 Five types of metaphors are identified in Cao and Wang’s (2017) study, namely, ILLNESS metaphor, LIFE metaphor, ANIMAL metaphor, FOOD metaphor, and BUILDING metaphor. ILLNESS metaphor and BUILDING metaphor were also identified in our data. Other than these two types, we also identified JOURNEY, WAR, BODY, and CAUSE metaphors in the data analysis section.

4 CorpusWordParser is specifically developed for parsing Chinese characters and tagging their parts of speech. AntConc is a free corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing, lexical frequency measuring, Kwic sorting, etc. While there are a variety of tools for textual analysis, they would not normally generate significantly different results in terms of keywords and lexical frequency. However, for higher reliability, we triangulated the data by using SegmentAnt 1.1.3 and WordSmith 7.0 and the same results were obtained, as seen in the data analysis section.

5 In this article, we adhere to the cognitive linguistics tradition of presenting conceptual metaphors and their domains with small capital letters.

6 For an examination of contingency tables, the chi-square test is usually employed for typically large datasets, while the Fisher’s exact test is more apt for estimating statistical differences of relatively small datasets (Brezina 2018).

7 The referential meanings of the English words are retrieved from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/).

8 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/30/world/china-communist-party-anniversary Accessed on November 25, 2021.

9 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57648236 Accessed on November 25, 2021.

10 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/china/ccp-100-beijing-china-xi-celebration-intl-hnk/index.html Accessed on November 25, 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work is sponsored by Chinese National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [grant number: 18BYY026], Center for the Development of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education [grant number: 2021ITA02004], and Education Department of Hubei Province [grant number: 2021155].