Institutional translators’ mediation of CPC Work Reports diachronically through personal pronouns: a corpus-based discourse analysis approach

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, this paper presents a diachronic-cum-contrastive study of institutional translators’ mediation of Chinese political discourse through personal pronouns and their collocations with modal verbs, with a view to identifying how interpersonal relations and power distance are diachronically mediated between the author and the readers when recontextualized. The corpus comprises six Work Reports of the Communist Party of China and their corresponding English translations from the 1990s to the 2010s. Textual analysis reveals that there has been a diachronically shifting trend across the six TTs towards constructing a closer and more symmetrical relationship with the target readers vis-à-vis the STs by manipulating personal pronouns. Moreover, the prevalent collocational patterns of ‘we’ with modal verbs tend to shift from encoding obligation in the earlier TTs to emphasizing inclination in more recent TTs. Further critical analysis of the metadiscourse of China’s institutional translation of political discourse suggests that such shifts over time have been motivated by a major ideological evolution in the Chinese political context and the changing target readership. Our findings suggest that a corpus-based diachronic perspective on translation may unveil subtle, patterned variations in minor linguistic signs that provide important clues to broader contextual transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Personal pronouns
• interpersonal relations
• ideology
• Chinese political discourse
• institutional translation

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China: [Grant Number 22CYY056].

Notes on contributors

Feng Pan

Feng Pan is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Translation and Interpreting, School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His academic interests include corpus-based translation studies, institutional translation, and discourse analysis. His publications have appeared in Target (2021), JoSTrans (2020), Across Languages and Cultures (2019, 2017), Babel (2021, 2016), Perspectives (2021, 2019), International Journal of Communication (2020, 2019). He has also published a book chapter with Palgrave Macmillan (2020) and a monograph with the Intellectual Property Publishing House (2020).

Yi Fu

Yi Fu is Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Wuhan Institute of Technology, China. Her academic interests include cross-cultural communication and language pedagogy.

Tao Li

Tao Li is Associate Professor at the Centre for Corpus Research, Shanghai Ocean University. His research interests cover corpus-based translation studies and discourse analysis. He has published papers in Target (2021), Perspectives (2021), Discourse & Society (2020), Discourse, Context & Media (2018) among others. He also co-authored Reappraising Self and Others: A Corpus-Based Study of Chinese Political Discourse in English Translation with Springer (2021).