Making sense of nationalism manifested in interpreted texts at ‘Summer Davos’ in China

ABSTRACT

‘Summer Davos’ meeting in China organised by the World Economic Forum is an annual event that brings together leading voices from the East and West in business, society, and politics. The economic-political challenges and geopolitical upheavals that intercepted temporarily and transnationally in the close-up to the 2016 Summer Davos meeting rendered this discursive event a site of particular political/ideological contestation. This study intends to make sense of the unobtrusive, pro- home-nation nationalist ideology manifested in the interpreted texts by Chinese conference interpreters who bridge language gaps in situ in the meeting. These textual manifestations of nationalism are examined by interrogating how specific discursive strategies are deployed in connection with thematic contents about China, the interpreters’ home-nation (self), in relation to other countries (others). Fundamentally, Chinese interpreters’ nationalism finds its way into their linguistic means that realise their specific strategies of self-censoring, neutralising self-negativity, aggrandising self-positivity and accentuating the negative-other representation in relation to topics on national sovereignty, territorial integrity, diplomatic relations and economic/political positions, all of which are crucial to the interests of a nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• ideology
• primordialist and instrumentalist perspectives
• conference interpreting
• ‘Summer Davos' in China

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Conference interpreters are regarded as ‘glamorous’ professionals. They are often perceived as linguistic experts who lend their voices to political leaders in international meetings (Gile, 2004, p. 13). They hold semi-official positions because they usually work ‘with politicians, ambassadors, and other senior public figures’ (Jones, 2002, p. 129).

2 Panel videos were downloaded from https://www.weforum.org/events/annual-meeting-of-the-new-champions-2016, in which panel topics are listed as Asia’s Shifting Alliances, China’s G20 Agenda, China's Global Ambitions, Global Economic Outlook, Into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, One Belt, One Road, Many Winners?, After the Brexit 1 and After the Brexit 2. Each panel consists of four to six speakers (with several national backgrounds from China, other Asian countries, and Western countries) with differing political or ideological beliefs in panel discussions. Since this study has no corpus-based quantitative aspects, other corpus details are not provided here due to limited space, but they are available from Gao (2020a).

3 This study follows Wodak’s (2004, p. 139) view of strategy: ‘a more or less accurate and more or less intentional plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic aim’. The features of ‘soft, relative determinism’ (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 32) resonate with the sometimes unconscious use of strategies in conference interpreting (cf. Gile, 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fei Gao

Fei Gao holds a PhD from the School of Languages, Culture and Societies of University of Leeds (UK). Her current research interests straddle translation/interpreting studies and CDA, with a focus on political discourses from transnational contexts. She is a lecturer in linguistics and translation studies at the School of Foreign Languages of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (China) and a conference interpreting practitioner. School of Languages, Culture and Societies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.