A corpus-based study of stance-taking as seen from critical points in interpreted political discourse

ABSTRACT

Interpreted political discourse has remained underexplored in spite of the significant role played by interpreting in the recontextualisation of political discourse across languages and cultures. The present study, based on a corpus of interpreted political discourse from China, explores how the stance of the Chinese government is interpreted from Chinese to English. The parallel bilingual corpus comprises 15 transcribed press conferences of two Chinese premiers from 1998 to 2012 that were interpreted into English by seven institutional interpreters. High-frequency keywords are identified with corpus tools and patterns of their translation are analysed. The framework of stance-taking is used to discuss ‘critical points’ in interpreting and to reveal the way in which ideology is decontextualized. It is found that the interpreters’ lexical choices reflect the government’s attitude and stance on various political and social issues. The investigation of critical points in interpreting (and translation) can provide valuable insights into a nation’s stance, which might not be achieved by looking at the monolingual text alone. The study may also inform empirical approaches to critical translation studies, which integrates the methodological strengths of critical discourse analysis and descriptive translation studies.

KEYWORDS:

• interpreted political discourse
• corpus-based study
• critical points in translation
• stance-taking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Binhua Wang is professor of interpreting and translation studies at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds. He has worked as assistant professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and associate professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. He is also a veteran conference interpreter. His research interest lies in various aspects of interpreting and translation studies, in which he supervises PhD students and has published widely in refereed CSSCI/CORE and SSCI/A&HCI journals.

Dr Dezheng Feng is assistant professor in the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include critical discourse analysis, multimodality and media communication.

ORCID

Binhua Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2404-5214

Notes

1 Cluster refers to a lexical bundle or multi-word unit. The search for clusters of a keyword is a typical way to identify recurrent expressions in corpus linguistics.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been supported by the LCS Strategic Research Development Fund [grant number SRDF2015-16/9] at University of Leeds.