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Metaphor and the Social World: Online-First Articles

China’s official use and translation of conflict metaphor over two decades

From statistical to behavioural variations and patterns

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Comprising metaphors of war and fight, the conflict metaphor, a revolutionary legacy, is not only prevalently employed in today’s state communications within China but also officially translated for the international community. Analysing the Chinese authority’s general use and translation of the conflict metaphor, this study aims to uncover cross-era variations and continuous patterns in these practices. The analysis is based on the Chinese governmental and Communist Party of China’s congressional reports and their official English-language translations from 2004 to 2023, a period that encompasses the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao era (2004–2013) and the Xi Jinping-Li Keqiang era (2014–2023). The research first quantifies the official use and translation in these reports and then, based on summary statistics of these data, it reveals that the domestic use of the conflict metaphor differs substantially across the two eras but the official translation remains largely consistent. Relying on time series analysis, this study suggests that, throughout the two decades, the domestic usage in one report may be influenced by that in the immediately preceding report and is highly sensitive to contextual factors, and that the translation appears to follow a moderation mechanism, which potentially contributes to cross-era consistency.
Keywords: metaphor in translation, corpus linguistics, quantitative methods, time series analysis, Chinese political discourse, conflict metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
    • 2.1The parallel corpus
    • 2.2Metaphor identification in Mandarin: An additional consideration on the morphemic level
    • 2.3Summary statistics and time series analyses
  • 3.Cross-era variations in use and translation
  • 4.Continuous patterns in domestic use
  • 5.Continuous patterns in official translation
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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