The image of the Chinese government in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government: a corpus-based study

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a corpus-based methodology and Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis, this article examines the image of the Chinese government constructed in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government released by the Chinese government from 2000 to 2021. The analysis reveals that the Chinese government is shaped as enterprising and industrious, but having a large power distance from the general public, which is evidenced by the discursive use of high-frequency content words, associated with high-frequency collocations with “we”. It is also constructed as one that is equable, resolute and sensible by the frequent use of median-value modal verbs in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government. This article ultimately argues that the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government are impacted by the translators’ role as institutional translators and the norms of translating Chinese political texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Report on the Work of the Government
• image
• the Chinese government
• corpus-based translation studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant Number 17ZDA319.

Notes on contributors

Kaibao Hu

Kaibao Hu is a professor of Translation Studies and dean of the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies, Shanghai, China. His main research interests are corpus-based translation studies and discourse analysis. He has published more than 110 articles on corpus-based translation studies and discourse analysis, and has been involved in the compilation of the English-Chinese Parallel Corpora of Shakespeare’s Plays, Chinese-English Conference Interpreting Corpus and Modern English-Chinese and Chinese-English Parallel Corpora in the past few years. He is author of The Historical Text of English-Chinese Dictionaries and the Evolution of the Chinese Language (Yiwen Press, 2005, in Chinese), Introducing Corpus-based Translation Studies (Springer, 2015, in English), A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Translations of Shakespeare’s Plays (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2015, in Chinese), A Corpus-based Study of Chinese-English Press Conference Interpreting (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2015, in Chinese), Introducing Corpus-based Critical Translation Studies (Higher Education Press, 2018, in Chinese) and Corpus-based Translation Studies in Chinese Contexts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Xiaoqian Li

Xiaoqian Li is an assistant researcher at the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies, Shanghai, China. Her main research interest is corpus-based translation studies. She has published more than 10 articles on corpus-based translation studies, and has been involved in the compilation of a number of bilingual and multilingual parallel corpora in the past few years.