‘We should have a deep understanding’: reinstantiating cognitive processes in the translation of Chinese political discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT The interpersonal aspect of political discourse has long been a central issue in translation studies. This paper adds to this line of research by drawing on the latest modelling of translation by systemic functional linguistics with some related notions of coupling, commitment and grammatical metaphor (GM). The language in focus was the coupling of “manner + cognitive process” as in “kexue renshi (scientifically understand)”. This study analysed two processes, renshi 认识 (know) and bawo 把握 (hold), extracted from the Chinese–English paralleled corpus of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China I. The major findings are as follows: (i) Cognitive processes were frequently coupled with evaluative manners in Chinese political discourse; (ii) Translation strategies were highly sensitive to the occurrence of manner; and (iii) Phrasal verbs were likelier to be used to reinstantiate “manner + cognitive process”; and (iv) Semantic prosody, GM and lexicalised intensification were the three mechanisms that helped achieve evaluative adequacy while accommodating acceptability to a target reader. Thus, in a political context, it seems that a translator is highly alert to the peculiarity of the Chinese language and often chooses to retain evaluative forces in translation.