Stance mediation in translating and recontextualizing political metaphors: a case study of the U.S. media’s quotation of the Chinese leader’s metaphors

Conflicts of interest, authorship, and disclosures in industry-related scientific publications: the tort bar and editorial oversight of medical journals.

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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of social progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Walter Lippmann In the spring of 18...

This chapter investigates how the political metaphor is accommodated and recontextualized in media discourse. Drawing on the recontextualization principles in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2003, Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge) and the engagement system in Appraisal Theory (AT) (Martin & White, 2005, The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan), an analytical model is proposed to examine the recontextualization of the Chinese political metaphor from a political speech to English media reports. The authors analyse how a metaphor used by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to Nepal generated a great deal of media coverage and how the metaphor was removed from its original context, translated, quoted and recontextualized in the English news discourse of both major Chinese and Anglo-American media. The chapter also illustrates how the strategies of discursive practices can be employed to identify the positioning and evaluation of the translation and quotations of the political metaphor in the recontextualization processes in media discourse.

This report presents findings from an examination of the scholarly uses of four prominent newspapers: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. This is a follow up project to earlier work quantifying the impacts of investment in humanities archives (Meyer, 2016; Meyer & Eccles, 2016, 2017) that looked at The New York Times in comparison to two digital collections: Early English Books Online and The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. That earlier research suggested that The New York Times when considered as a scholarly resource had a much broader influence across disciplines than the other resources we examined, with publications spread right across a standardized overlay map of scholarly publications. Updated versions of those findings are presented in this report, along with comparisons to the other newspapers we examine here. The four newspapers in question were selected to provide a comparison between American (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and United Kingdom publications (The Guardian), but also between newspapers with different target audiences. The New York Times and Guardian both appeal to a general educated readership, while the Wall Street Journal is aimed at those interested in business and finance, and the Washington Post appeals particularly to those interested in U.S. politics.

The war unleashed by Russia in 2022 is widely presented in online versions of English-language newspapers; Ukraine is constantly in the epicentre of the world news. This study highlights political and ideological contexts of the war in Ukraine, the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of news according to an interdisciplinary approach considering the language as a social practice. The article highlights the polarization in the presentation of the events and the main actors entitled in the discursive strategies, representing the dichotomy In- versus Out-group. The study is aimed at the investigation of the ideological structures and their manifesting linguistic devices in political discourse based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of discursive strategies for constructing the images of Ukraine and Russia in the British and American press. The integrated Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to the research of the news to study the media discourse and the language, where CDA focuses on social practice, social power and ideology. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) is used to research the ideology of war images presented in the language of news reports. The relevance of this study determined by the aim is to show the main discursive strategies of polaeization in political media discourse. The research methods of the article combine three vectors of the analysis by Fairclough with explanatory tools (by van Dijk), and the elements of stylistic analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis. The illustrative material was collected by information search and continuous sample from the open access newspapers and magazines issued in the US and Great Britain (The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others). Conclusion. This research argues that polarisation is being demonstrated in the media discourse on the war in Ukraine in 2022. The taxonomy of the identified discursive strategies of polarization deployed in the media political discourse includes labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization, personalization and analogy, that can either be used singly or intervened. The discursive strategy of evidentiality is applied to authorities, officials, witnesses that are accepted as trustworthy sources of data; the number game strategy combined with victimization are verbalized by metaphoric simile, metonymy, enumerating and magnifying the numbers with the modifying adverbs; the strategy of hyperbole conveys the positive impression of the in-group and negative acts magnification of the out-group verbalized by metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy; the personalization strategy is deployed with the purpose of foregrounding the positive actions of the in-group that implies negative out-group actions; the strategy of analogy is applied in the comparison of the war in Ukraine and the struggle of the Ukrainians for their independence with other historical events. Linguistic means used to realize the discursive strategies of polarization include the conceptual metaphor, metonymy, simile, idioms, metaphtonymy, intertextual allusion and personification.

Since Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) was introduced, methods of studying conceptual metaphor have kept improving to respond to methodological criticisms. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black (2004) has been considered as a “thought-provoking contribution” to metaphor analysis (Deignan, 2005) when approaching metaphor from various perspectives: critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. CMA is originally applied to one conceptual level in metaphor – domain. However, this paper argues that CMA can be exploited at four conceptual levels in Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor (Kövecses, 2017b) - image schema, domain, frame, and mental space. The combined framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (Charteris-Black, 2004) and Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor – MLV (Kövecses, 2017b) can gain deeper insights into ideologies motivating metaphorical concepts for the Vietnam war as well as elucidate the conceptual structure of metaphor via the four levels. Hence, this combination fills the gap of lacking a framework with optimal balance of semantic, pragmatic, cognitive and critical dimensions. It also features the intriguing relationship between ideologies and conceptual structure, i.e., ideologies are embedded in all the four conceptual levels and systematically develop with increasing specificity from image schema to domain, frame and mental space. The focus of this paper is on our argument for an integrated framework of conceptual metaphor and the newspaper articles written by American war correspondents during the Vietnam war are used for illustration of how the integrated framework can help us better understand the conceptual metaphors in the articles.

Politicians and orators employ words as weapons in order to exert ideological control and make an audience believe something in an ostensive way. In this regard, taking critical-political discourse analysis and appraisal theory as theoretical frameworks, it is the purpose of this paper to shed some light on the dysphemistic words and expressions identified in some of the memorable wartime speeches over a crucial two-year period for the outcome of the Second World War (1940–1941) by one of the most outstanding British politicians and statesmen, Winston Churchill. As metaphors are pervasive in political discourse and vital to the language of leadership, special attention is given to the analysis of dysphemistic figurative language within Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory and Charteris-Black's critical metaphor analysis. The results obtained support the idea that Churchill's skillful use of dysphemism is closely connected with his overall political goals of instilling courage and inspiring confidence in his fellow countrymen in such difficult times for Britain as those of a war against the powerful Nazi Germany.

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As warships from a dozen nations patrol the waters off Somalia, trying to stem the piratical tide, the international community is once again trying to rebuild a centralized government in Mogadishu ...

The article focuses on the metaphorical conceptualisation of the #MeToo movement, which has spread virally as a hashtag used on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment. The #MeToo movement as a social issue is looked at from the perspective of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) (Charteris-Black 2005/2011, 2014, Musolff 2004, 2016, Koller 2014, De Landtsheer 2009, Hart 2010). CMA is a blend of Cognitive Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis that aims at identifying how metaphors are used to describe socially contested issues and how they reveal speakers’ hidden intentions and attitudes (Charteris-Black, 2014, p. 174). CMA is also concerned with the different functions metaphors may perform. A predicative function, being one of many, is most likely to explain how socially sensitive issues are communicated (Charteris-Black, 2014, pp. 204-207; Musolff, 2016, p. 4). In other words, it implies positive or negative attitudes expressed towards certain issues. Thus, the paper aims to study how the predicative function of metaphor manifests in the discourse of contemporary social concerns cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. In other words, the paper looks into how different attitudes towards the #MeToo movement are communicated via metaphors in Lithuanian and English media and how they shape prevailing public attitudes.

Appraisal theory (AT) is developed from Systemic Functional Linguistics. It focuses on the interpersonal meaning of the text, which expresses the speaker’s attitude and constructs ideological space. However, AT has developed quite lately in translation studies with certain achievements as well as limitations in the previous studies. Thus, this study conducted a literature review to generalize the status quo of studies applying AT in translation from 2011 to 2021. The method of this study is a systematic literature review that selected 27 articles from three databases based on the screening procedure of PRISMA 2020. It also used qualitative synthesis to analyze the contents of the included studies in terms of genres, research foci, application of AT as well as methodologies. This study finds that AT is widely used in analyzing translation shifts, especially in the text types of politics, news and literature with the foci of appraisal shifts, ideology and positioning. However, the number of translation studies applying AT is still limited, and there is potential to examine AT in other text types. Besides, there is also a lack of mixed method or corpus-based analysis. Therefore, this study provides a detailed review of AT in translation studies and reveals some research gaps that could enlighten future studies.

Appraisal theory (AT) is developed from Systemic Functional Linguistics. It focuses on the interpersonal meaning of the text, which expresses the speaker’s attitude and constructs ideological space. However, AT has developed quite lately in translation studies with certain achievements as well as limitations in the previous studies. Thus, this study conducted a literature review to generalize the status quo of studies applying AT in translation from 2011 to 2021. The method of this study is a systematic literature review that selected 27 articles from three databases based on the screening procedure of PRISMA 2020. It also used qualitative synthesis to analyze the contents of the included studies in terms of genres, research foci, application of AT as well as methodologies. This study finds that AT is widely used in analyzing translation shifts, especially in the text types of politics, news and literature with the foci of appraisal shifts, ideology and positioning. However, the number of translation studies applying AT is still limited, and there is potential to examine AT in other text types. Besides, there is also a lack of mixed method or corpus-based analysis. Therefore, this study provides a detailed review of AT in translation studies and reveals some research gaps that could enlighten future studies.

The term BRICS—referring to the association of emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—dominated the headlines in March 2013 as Durban hosted the annual group summit. S...

The emergence of the coronavirus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, posed an immediate threat to national security and public health. Despite initial attempts to downplay its seriousness, the pandemic swiftly induced widespread fear worldwide. President Donald Trump positioned himself as a "wartime president", advocating for a comprehensive campaign and declaring war on SARS-CoV-2. This novel framing was widely embraced by the media to help the public grasp the severity of the virus. Consequently, coverage of COVID-19 proliferated across various media platforms, making it one of the most dominant topics of discussion. This paper applies Critical Metaphor Analysis to examine the utilization of war metaphors in American media discourse during the global health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Focusing on The New York Times' political journalism between June 1 and July 1, 2020, the study scrutinizes twenty news articles to assess the prevalence and implications of war analogies in pandemic coverage. The analysis reveals a diverse and vigorous deployment of such metaphors, highlighting their pervasive influence in framing COVID-19 as a conflict. Additionally, the paper presents a conceptual model of the war metaphor in this context, supported by various mappings of the conceptual metaphor, elucidating the portrayal of COVID-19 as a war-like scenario within the broader global health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus.