'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

Contributing to a much-needed outward turn in interpreting studies, this study examines the role of interpreting and interpreters in (re)articulating the voice of a developing nation in the global South. Against the backdrop of China’s reform and opening-up (ROU), the study explores how government interpreters mediate Beijing’s discourses of international engagement and global involvement. Unlike CDA, which often foregrounds negative themes, an innovative corpus-based positive discourse analysis (PDA) is introduced, drawing on 20 years of China’s Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences. Findings point to interpreters’ visibility and agency in facilitating and strengthening China’s discourse through the (over)production of core lexical items and salient collocational patterns. Following trends in interdisciplinarity and digital humanities, this corpus-based PDA illustrates how a major non-Western developing country communicates its discourse bilingually before the international community, and discusses implications for the shifting East–West power balance.

Chonglong Gu