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Title
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Shifting meaning potential in interpreter-mediated formal interaction : the case of the Chinese premier's press conference in China
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Author
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Abstract
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| China has made an amazing and spectacular advancement in its economy in the past four decades since its reform and opening up in 1978. The economic success helps bring China back into the international politics and promote its re-engagement with the rest of the world. Now ‘to tell China's stories well, to make the voice of China heard, and present a true, multi-dimensional, and panoramic view of China to the world’ (President Xi Jinping) is the overarching communicative goal of China’s public political discourse. The Chinese Premier is the highest-level political leader who has an annual face-to-face meeting with the international press. His interpreted live-televised Chinese Premier’s Press Conference (the CPPC) in the form of Q&A offers a channel to make the top policy maker’s voice heard directly by the international audience. It is of great significance to have an in-depth investigation into how China’s institutional voice represented by the premier is conveyed via the consecutive interpreter to the world. This data-driven empirical case study of the 2017 interpreted CPPC, based on the transcription of the video, takes a linguistic pragmatic perspective and conceives of it as an instance of language use in its formal political setting. The indeterminacy of meaning and interadaptability of meaning negotiation entails that meaning exists as meaning potential, viz. a range of possible meanings (Verschueren 2018). This brings thorny problems as well as room for manipulation to interpreters for whom the source and target languages provide different affordances (Verschueren 2018). As political discourse in the media, the data feature the combination of institutional discourse, media discourse and mediated political discourse. The interpreter, different from her counterparts in similar European contexts, is government-affiliated and a ‘civil-servant interpreter-translator’ (Setton 2001). In the face of a web of differentiated international audiences composed mainly of on-site journalists and an off-site general public, subject to institutional goals and procedures, deprived of the possibility of follow-up questions and feedback, the interpreter is greatly contextually constrained. My investigation finds ample linguistic traces at various levels that eventually point to strong tendencies that reveal the interpreter’s intervention and agency: in terms of discourse coherence, image construction (both China’s institutional image and the premier’s personal image), information priority and cultural mediation. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerpen
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Universiteit Antwerpen, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
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2020
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Volume/pages
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295 p.
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Note
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Pang, Ching Lin [Supervisor]
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Verschueren, Jef [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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