“Beauties by the political figures:” professional female interpreters in Chinese media

ABSTRACT

During the annual Two Sessions in China, interpreters work for the political figures and foreign correspondents at press conferences. During this important conference, which draws attention from both within and outside China, the female interpreters receive significant attention in news reports. This study reports an analysis of the headlines, photos and body texts of news reports which show that the female interpreters have been presented as 1) subservient to political power, 2) desexualized, 3) physically attractive and 4) professionally competent. Such media presentation results from the convergence of four factors: the revival of oppressive tradition in the workplace, which calls for Chinese career women to return home and fixes their vision on stable and well-reputed jobs; the education system which has produced a large population that has had lengthy experience learning English but little chance to use it; the solemn grand narrative of building up the national image; and individualist post-feminism.

KEYWORDS:

• Female interpreter
• media
• post-feminism
• politics
• professional

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Professor Binhua Wang at Leeds University and Lejin Zhang at Jiangsu Normal University for their support that helped me finish this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by China’s National Social Science Fund for Young Scholars, entitled “Discursive patterns and narrative models of China’s image representation in China’s and British mainstream media” [16CYY018].

Notes on contributors

Du Yiwei

Yiwei Du is currently a lecturer at Yuanpei College, Shaoxing University. He obtained his doctoral degree in socio-linguistics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Email: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected]