Cover not available
Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 14:1 (2019) ► pp.1–20

Interpreters caught up in an ideological tug-of-war?

A CDA and Bakhtinian analysis of interpreters’ ideological positioning and alignment at government press conferences

| University of Manchester

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.

Keywords: interpreter-mediated political press conferences, Bakhtin, dialogized heteroglossia, interpreter agency, critical discourse analysis (CDA)
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Toward theorizing political press conference as site of dialogized heteroglossia
  • Interpreters’ location: Negotiation between the centripetal and centrifugal
  • Theoretical framework, data, and methodology
  • Data analysis
  • Discussions and conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 5 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.00027.gu
References
Al-Hejin, Bandar
2012 “Linking critical discourse analysis with translation studies: An example from BBC News.” Journal of Language and Politics (3): 311–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michal Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak
2008 “A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.” Discourse and Society 19 (3): 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich
1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist; trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Beaton, Morven
2007 Intertextuality and ideology in interpreter-mediated communication: The case of the European Parliament. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Edinburgh: Heriot-Watt University.Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi
2006 “Critical discourse analysis of political press conferences.” Discourse and Society 17 (2): 173–203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Catford, John
1965 A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist
1984 Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven, and John Heritage
2002 “Questioning presidents: journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of U.S. presidents Eisenhower and Reagan.” Journal of Communication 52 (4): 749–775. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du, Xujia, and Johanna Rendle-Short
2016 “Journalist questions: comparing adversarialness in Chinese political press conferences.” Discourse, Context and Media 121: 51–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, Göran
2011 “Follow-up questions in political press conferences.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (14): 3331–3344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak
1997 “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. by T. A. van Dijk, 258–284. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Gardiner, Michael
1992 The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gu, Chonglong
2018a “Towards a re-definition of government interpreters’ agency against a backdrop of sociopolitical and cultural evolution: a case of premier’s press conferences in china.” In Redefining Translation and Interpretation in Cultural Evolution, ed. by O. I. Seel, 238–257. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018b “Forging a glorious past via the ‘present perfect’: A corpus-based CDA analysis of China’s past accomplishments discourse mediat(is)ed at China’s interpreted political press conferences.” Discourse, Context and Media 241: 137–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
forthcoming. “Mediating ‘face’ in triadic political communication: A CDA analysis of press conference interpreters’ discursive (re)construction of Chinese government’s image (1998–2017).” Critical Discourse Studies.
Halliday, M. A. K.
1985 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Hardt-Mautner, Gerlinde
1995 “ ‘Only Connect.’ Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.” UCREL Technical Papers 6. Lancaster: University of Lancaster.Google Scholar
Hu, Kaibao, and Lingzi Meng
2018 “Gender differences in Chinese-English press conference interpreting.” Perspectives 26 (1): 117–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Kyung-Hye
2017 “Newsweek discourses on China and their Korean translations: a corpus-based approach.” Discourse, Context and Media 151: 34–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Xin, and Hu Kaibao
2013 “A corpus-based study of modal verbs in Chinese-English government press conference interpretation.” Computer-Assisted Foreign Language Education in China 31: 26–32.Google Scholar
Martin, Anne
2016 “Interpreting and ideology: research trends and methods.” In Addressing Methodological Challenges in Interpreting Studies Research, ed. by Claudio Bendazzoli and Claudia Monacelli, 225–244. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Pan, Feng, and Binghan Zheng
2017 “Gender difference of hedging in interpreting for Chinese government press conferences: a corpus-based study.” Across Languages and Cultures 18 (2): 171–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandrelli, Annalisa
2018 “Interpreter-mediated football press conferences: a study on the questioning and answering strategies.” In Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies, eds. by Mariachiara Russo, Claudio Bendazzoli and Bart Defrancq, 185–204. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schäffner, Christina
2015 “Speaker positioning in interpreter-mediated press conferences.” Target 27 (3): 422–439. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sun, Tingting
2010 “Adversarial questioning and answering strategies in Chinese government press conferences.” Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 8 (2): 131–162.Google Scholar
2012 Interpreters’ mediation of government press conferences in China: participation framework, footing and face work. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Manchester: University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A.
1997 “What is political discourse analysis?” In Political Linguistics, ed. by J. Blommaert and G. Bulcaen, 11–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Van Leeuwen, T.
1996 “The representation of social actors.” In Text and Practices:Readings in Critical Analysis, ed. by C. M. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard, 32–70. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wang, Binhua
2012 “A descriptive study of norms in interpreting: based on the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting corpus of Chinese premier press conferences.” Meta 57 (1): 198–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Binhua and Bing Zou
2018 “Exploring language specificity as a variable in Chinese-English interpreting. A corpus-based investigation.” In Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies, eds. by Mariachiara Russo, Claudio Bendazzoli and Bart Defrancq, 65–82. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Binhua and Dezheng Feng
2018 “A corpus-based study of stance-taking as seen from critical points in interpreted political discourse.” Perspectives 26 (2): 246–260. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart
1999 The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wu, Feng, and Hong Zhao
2016 “How to respond to journalists’ questions? A new perspective on Chinese premiers’ aggressiveness at press conferences (1993–2015).” Asian Journal of Communication 26 (5): 446–465. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yi, Yan
2016a “The structural evolution of the Chinese premier’s press conference: A study in institutionalization.” Asian Journal of Communication 26 (3): 223–239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016b “Information control and political impression management: A dramaturgical analysis of the Chinese premier’s press conference.” International Journal of Communication 101: 5473–5493.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 9 other publications

Bartłomiejczyk, Magdalena
2021. Interpreting nonmainstream ideology (Euroscepticism) in the European Parliament. Perspectives ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gu, Chonglong
2019. (Re)manufacturing consent in English. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 31:3 ► pp. 465 ff. DOI logo
Gu, Chonglong
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2020. Journalistic translation research goes global: theoretical and methodological considerations five years on. Perspectives 28:3 ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2021. News production and intercultural communication at the crossroads of disciplines. Language and Intercultural Communication 21:3 ► pp. 323 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 november 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.