Concordancing DEVELOP* at the Interpreter-mediated Press Conferences

Abstract

Thanks to the pragmatist Reform and Opening-up (RoU) program initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China, the largest developing country, has witnessed decades of sustained development and is poised to overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world. RoU is a major watershed in China’s recent history, signaling the beginning of China’s rapid economic development and meteoric rise over the past few decades in the global arena. The broader RoU discourse represents an important overarching metadiscourse, legitimizing China’s miscellaneous developments and policies, economic system, style of governance, and stances for the entire post-1978 period. In particular, ‘development’ is an operative word for and a key component of the RoU, which also constitutes a central and recurring theme throughout the interpreter-mediated premier-meets-the-press conferences in China. Development studies represents a growing and interdisciplinary research area. However, it is rarely explored from a discursive perspective in political interpreting, despite the vital mediating role of interpreters. To bridge this gap, framed within the broader trends of interdisciplinary research and digital humanities, the pragmatist mixed-methods approach of corpus-based critical discourse analysis is applied to the premier-meets-the-press data (1998–2017) to explore the government-affiliated interpreters’ agency and (re)construction of China’s ‘development’ discourse over one-fifth of a century. The study reveals the interpreters’ institutional (over)alignment and frequent strengthening of Beijing’s development discourse in English at different levels using various discursive means. Discursively, this established the interpreters’ role and text ownership in (re)shaping reality, further facilitating China’s development, (re)constructing and disseminating sociopolitical knowledge, and possibly even effecting changes and transformations to the East–West power differentials as vital (re)tellers of the Chinese story. Looking beyond the traditional view of interpreting as a more static and mechanical process in a semi-closed and self-contained system, this article discusses the vital role interpreting plays from a historical, communication, geopolitical and development perspective.

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“…That is, the interpreter-mediated discourses can contribute discursively to the constantly shifting and delicate power differentials between China and the more dominant and vociferous West and counterbalance the naturalised and often taken-for-granted Western narratives [ 39 , 40 ]. Therefore, interpreting in this institutional context can be seen as of strategic importance for China’s development as the second largest economy and the largest developing country in the global south [ 6 , 9 ], especially given the potentially far-reaching discursive impact of the interpreter-mediated discourse in the global arena [ 43 ]. Such interpreter mediation is of particular interest, considering that those interpreters tend to further progress in their careers as government officials, ambassadors, high-profile political commentators and China’s foreign ministers.…”

“…using corpus linguistics) has been applied in a limited yet growing body of research. These include monolingual (critical) discourse analysis [ 15 ], literary translation [ 37 ], and interpreter-mediated political communication [ 6 , 9 , 16 ] in different contexts and settings.…”

“…As an example of the overriding focus on development in the post-1978 period, Deng Xiaoping remarked that “development is the only hard truth” ( fazhan caishi yingdaoli ) and China must develop itself in various aspects. China’s ROU metadiscourse itself represents part of a wider development discourse in the global south [ 9 ], encapsulating various objectives and plans, concrete practices and policies, useful experiences, as well as developmental views, path, philosophy and wisdom unique to the Chinese context. Recently, as China develops economically and geopolitically, the country is also seeking to boost its discursive power and have its voice heard globally.…”

“…As such, there has been a lack of sufficient scholarly engagement with how the ROU discourse has been constructed and communicated. In particular, there has been even less attention so far in terms of the (re)construction of the ROU metadiscourse bilingually in translation and interpreting, barring two recent studies [ 6 , 9 ]. In translation and interpreting studies (TIS) in general, drawing on a (critical) discourse analytical or a social narrative approach, there has relatively recently been growing recognition in terms of the crucial agency and mediation role of translators [ 3 , 4 , 10 , 11 ] and interpreters [ 12 – 14 ] from various conflictual, sociopolitical, institutional and historical contexts via more manual qualitative analysis.…”