ABSTRACT
The interpreter-mediated premier-meets-the-press conferences are an institutionalised practice in mainland China, permitting the Chinese premiers to address journalists’ questions on a wide range of issues of common concern. This televised discursive event enables China’s top decision-maker to clarify Beijing’s official positions and articulate discursively what constitutes truth and fact. Drawing on a corpus consisting of 20 years’ press conference data, this CDA study explores how China’s discourse is (re)configured by interpreters in English through metadiscursive resources semantically related to truth, fact and reality (e.g. in fact, actually, indeed, as a matter of fact). A comparison of metadiscursive devices established in both sub-corpora shows that the interpreters tend to proliferate the use of these markers in English overall. Discursively, this adds an additional layer of factualness and authority to the Chinese original. In addition, special attention is focused on the structure ‘the fact that’. Due to its linguistic property to front-load attitudinal meanings and express stance, the noun complement structure (the fact that) is proven useful in knowledge construction in academic writing (cf. Jiang and Hyland 2015) yet remains largely underexplored in interpreter-mediated political encounters from the perspective of ideology and discourse. Critical comparative analyses point to the interpreters’ proliferated use of this structure. This leads to further political legitimation and the (re)creation of positive self-representation and negative other-representation in interpreting, thus constituting a classic case of van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ (1997). To illustrate the potential global ramifications of such (re)construction, examples of the interpreted discourse being taken for granted and invoked, quoted or (re)contextualised verbatim by various media outlets and official sources are also presented. This study highlights the interpreters’ role as important co-constructors of the ‘Chinese story’ and vital agents of truth and knowledge for Beijing.
