‘Climate change concerns human survival…and justice in our international community’: A corpus-based positive discourse analysis (PDA) of the largest developing nation’s global involve/engagement discourses (re)told in interpreting

Abstract

Contributing to a much-needed ‘outward turn’ in interpreting studies, this intervention examines the role of interpreting and interpreters in (re)articulating the welcome ‘voice’ of a developing nation in the global South. Against the backdrop of reform and opening-up (ROU), China, the world’s largest developing country, is increasingly open and keen to engage globally. Such elements as openness, integration, and international engagement represent vital components of the overarching ROU metadiscourse that justifies China’s sociopolitical system and multifarious policies and decisions. As part of a series of digital humanities (DH) informed empirical studies exploring the part played by interpreting in rendering China’s ROU metadiscourse, this study zooms in on the government interpreters’ mediation of Beijing’s international engagement and global involvement discourses. Unlike CDA which often foregrounds the negative themes (e.g. injustice, oppression, dominance, and hegemony), an innovative corpus-based positive discourse analysis (PDA) is introduced and applied, drawing on 20 years of China’s press conferences. This article points to the interpreters’ visibility and agency in facilitating and strengthening China’s discourse through (over)producing core lexical items and salient collocational patterns. Following the trends of interdisciplinarity and digital humanities, this corpus-based PDA study illustrates ultimately how a major non-Western developing country from the global South communicates its discourse bilingually in front of the international community. The potential impact and implications of the interpreter-in(tro)duced discursive changes are discussed vis-à-vis the ever shifting and delicate East-West power balance from the perspective of (geo)politics