Contrastive images of journalists and Chinese premiers in interpreter-mediated press conferences: a case study of Chinese 'xiexie'

摘要

Although it is important to research the images of politicians as recreated in interpreted discourse, to date, minimal attention has been paid to interpreter-reshaped contrastive images of journalists and state leaders in a highly institutional central government-initiated context. This paper investigates how interpreters rebuild journalists' and Chinese premiers' images by rendering the Chinese word '(sic) (henceforth, 'xiexie', which translates to 'thank you') in English interpreted discourse. Through stratified random sampling, six Chinese premiers' press conferences with conference consecutive interpreting services were selected for the case study. Using CUC_ParaConc software as an analytical tool, the researcher found that interpreters omitted most of the journalists' 'xiexie' while rendering almost all of the premiers' 'xiexie'. For this reason, the polite images of journalists in Chinese may be construed as being direct and impolite in the English interpretations, while the premiers' friendly and polite images tended to be maintained in the English version. It is argued that these distinct reconstructed images can be explained in terms of the tenor and institutional context of high-level Chinese political interpreting practice.