This paper investigates the critical role of the interpreter’s political awareness in interpreting high-level political interviews in China, and its effects on pronoun shifts. Using former Chinese Premier Zhu’s debut press conference in 1998 as a case study, the study examines in detail the pronoun shifts of a China’s Foreign Ministry senior interpreter prompted by her political awareness. It identifies four types of pronoun shifts: (1) from first-person singular pronoun (“I”) to first-person plural pronoun (“we”); (2) from active voice with first-person plural pronoun as subject to passive voice; (3) from pronoun to a third-party noun; and (4) replacement of a noun with an interactant pronoun. The paper considers implications of these findings in relation to relevant studies and to the macro-social institutional context in which the political interpreting is conducted. The paper argues that this type of political awareness is a form of socio-institutional cognition inculcated and developed through the interpreter’s diplomatic identity, their understanding of socio-institutional requirements, strict training and a large quantity of supervised practice.
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2022. Political Discourse and Translation Studies. A Bibliometric Analysis in International Core Journals. Sage Open 12:1
Gao, Fei
2022. A brief review of studies on interpreters' ideological mediation/intervention at international conferences. Frontiers in Communication 7
Guo, Yijun
2021. Contrastive images of journalists and Chinese premiers in interpreter-mediated press conferences: a case study of Chinese ‘xiexie’. Perspectives 29:4 ► pp. 507 ff.
Vora, Davina, Jennie Sumelius, Kristiina Mäkelä & Sofia John
2021. Us and them: Disentangling forms of identification in MNCs. Journal of International Management 27:1 ► pp. 100805 ff.
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