The interpreter-mediated Premier-Meets-the-Press Conferences are an institutional(ized) discursive event in China,
permitting the Chinese premier to answer a range of potentially challenging and face-threatening questions from journalists.
Arguably, this dynamic and interactive setting can be profitably conceptualized using Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized
heteroglossia. As additional subjective actors in the triadic communication process, the government-affiliated interpreters are
caught up in an ideological tug-of-war between the government and (foreign) journalists. That is, there is often a centripetal
force pulling toward Beijing’s official positions and stances (the central, unitary and authoritative) and simultaneously a
centrifugal force exerted by (foreign) journalists who pose sensitive and adversarial questions (toward the heteroglossic and
peripheral away from the center). Manual CDA on 20 years’ corpus data illustrates the interpreters’ tendency to align with the
government’s official positions, soften the journalists’ questions and (re)construct a more desirable image for Beijing.
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Liu, Ruey-Ying
2023. Interpreters as Spin Doctors: The Interactional Role of Interpreters in China’s Political Press Conferences. The International Journal of Press/Politics
Wang, Huabin
2023. Instrumentalisation of critical discourse studies: a linguistic analysis of public relations concepts in the CDS journal article abstracts (2000–2020). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1
Bartłomiejczyk, Magdalena
2022. Interpreting nonmainstream ideology (Euroscepticism) in the European Parliament. Perspectives 30:4 ► pp. 678 ff.
Li, Tao & Kaibao Hu
2021. Corpus-Based Translation Studies and Political Discourse Analysis. In Reappraising Self and Others [Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 6], ► pp. 13 ff.
Li, Xin & Ranran Zhang
2021. The diplomatic interpreter’s negotiation of power and solidarity through engagement choices: A case study of the Chinese Foreign Minister’s 2018 press conference. Discourse, Context & Media 39 ► pp. 100459 ff.
Matsushita, Kayo
2021. Diverging narratives: exploring the hidden influence of transquoting in framing the journalistic portrayal of Shiori Ito. Language and Intercultural Communication 21:3 ► pp. 366 ff.
Gu, Chonglong & Rebecca Tipton
2020. (Re-)voicing Beijing’s discourse through self-referentiality: a corpus-based CDA analysis of government interpreters’ discursive mediation at China’s political press conferences (1998–2017). Perspectives 28:3 ► pp. 406 ff.
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2020. Journalistic translation research goes global: theoretical and methodological considerations five years on. Perspectives 28:3 ► pp. 325 ff.
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2021. News production and intercultural communication at the crossroads of disciplines. Language and Intercultural Communication 21:3 ► pp. 323 ff.
2020. Concordancing China’s Friend, Foe and Frenemy: A Corpus-based CDA of Geopolitical Actors (Re)presented at China’s Interpreter-mediated Political Press Conferences. In Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses [The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, ], ► pp. 197 ff.
Gu, Chonglong
2022. Interpreters as Vital (Re)Tellers of China’s Reform and Opening-Up Meta-Narrative: A Digital Humanities (DH) Approach to Institutional Interpreters’ Mediation. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Gu, Chonglong
2024. The (un)making and (re)making of Guangzhou’s ‘Little Africa’: Xiaobei’s linguistic and semiotic landscape explored. Language Policy
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