Abstract
ABSTRACTThe premier's annual press conferences are an interpreter-mediated and institutionalised event, which enables the Chinese government to articulate its official discourse on a variety of topics in front of a domestic and international audience. Framing the conferences as part of an autopoietic system, following Luhmann, helps to shed light on the imperative for such systems to legitimate themselves for their autonomous and continued existence through discourse. This is achieved, in part, through self-reference. Drawing on a corpus-based study informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, we explore the government-affiliated interpreters' mediation of Beijing's discourse on different levels using self-referential terms. The interpreters are found to frequently add self-referential terms (e.g. we, our, government, China) in English overall. They are also observed employing the broader WE (e.g. we, our, us) proportionally at the expense of the premier's personal voice I and that of the GOVERNMENT and CHINA. The interpreters' institutional positioning and identity as part of the government is therefore confirmed through their explicit discursive interventions, which help convey what Searle terms ‘collective intentionality’ and contribute to the legitimacy of the government. The discursive effects of these are discussed using bilingual examples.
Highlights
The Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are an interpreter-mediated televised event held annually in the Chinese capital Beijing
It can be argued that, to varying degrees, all systems, institutions, and organisations thrive on self-reference for their autonomous and continued existence
Self-referentiality and the translation regime in which it operates are worthy of particular scholarly attention
Summary
The Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are an interpreter-mediated televised event held annually in the Chinese capital Beijing. The top three selfreferential items in the English subcorpus are the first-person plural WE, that is, we and its related forms (52.6%), CHINA, that is, China and Chinese (24.8%) and GOVERNMENT, that is, government(s) (10.5%), constituting 87.9% of all identified self-references in subcorpus B Apart from their mediation of self-referentiality overall, the interpreters’ increased alignment is evidenced pronouncedly in their mediation of the top three self-referential items across languages Self-referential items tend to be rendered significantly more explicit as subjects in English, further foregrounding the Chinese government discursively as the social actor and agent responsible for various actions in interpreting. The decrease in adversarialness of the premiers’ answers has, to some extent, been compensated by the interpreters’ more pronounced and active positioning using WE (which leads to further government hegemony and a sense of togetherness)
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