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Target
Vol. 36:1 (2024) ► pp.50–75

The fight metaphor in translation: From patriotism to pragmatism

A corpus-based critical analysis of metaphor in China’s political discourse

ORCID logo | University of Manchester
The fight metaphors discussed in this article are linguistic expressions of physical conflict, a revolutionary legacy that still lingers in contemporary Chinese political discourse. This article takes a critical cognitive-linguistic approach to fight metaphors in translation, analysing a dataset comprising the Chinese governmental and Communist Party of China’s congressional reports and their official English-language translations from 2004 to 2020. The discussion highlights conceptual metaphor’s representational role and its ideological potential in discourse, and operationalises the English-based metaphor identification procedure (Steen et al. 2010) for Mandarin texts. Drawing on corpus-based evidence, the article argues that fight metaphors in the source texts (STs) legitimise and consolidate Beijing’s dominance of domestic power by generating positive representations and reproducing patriotic ideology. The translations of those metaphors transform Beijing’s image, assertive in the STs, into a non-aggressive one for the international readership. The target texts (TTs) also reproduce favourable representations from the STs to justify China’s unique political system and to satisfy a pragmatic need – that of constructing positive images for the Chinese authority and China internationally.
Keywords: metaphor in translation, conceptual metaphor theory, critical metaphor analysis, political discourse, self-representation, ideology, corpus-based translation studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus-based critical analysis of metaphor in translation
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data and corpora
    • 3.2Identification, description, interpretation, and explanation
  • 4.Identification and description: Linguistic metaphors and translation procedures
  • 5.Interpretation: Positive self-representations for internal and external legitimisation
    • 5.1Unite, and unite around the Party
    • 5.2The righteous and glorious Party
    • 5.3Fight as a virtue and a means/process
    • 5.4Positive self-representations for legitimisation
  • 6.Explanation: From patriotism to pragmatism
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 October 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21151.wu
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