The fight metaphor in translation: From patriotism to pragmatism

What is it about?

The fight metaphors discussed in this article are linguistic expressions of physical conflict that are metaphorically employed in political texts of China. These expressions can be understood as a legacy of China’s successive revolutions in the 1950s through the 1970s, and they are still prevalent in today’s political communications in the country. This article examines how the fight metaphors are officially translated into English for the international society and, more importantly, how the official translation strengthens Beijing’s political power. The dataset underlying this investigation comprises the Chinese governmental and Communist Party of China’s congressional reports and their official English-language translations from 2004 to 2020. Drawing on crosslingual evidence, the article argues that fight metaphors in the source texts (STs) legitimise and consolidate Beijing’s dominance of domestic power by generating positive images of the Chinese authority and reproducing patriotic ideology. The translations of those metaphors transform Beijing’s image, assertive in the STs, into a non-aggressive one for the international readership. The target texts (TTs) also reproduce favourable representations from the STs to justify China’s unique political system and to satisfy a pragmatic need – that of constructing positive images for the Chinese authority and China internationally.

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Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

Why is it important?

By revealing how the fight metaphors are co-opted in today's state communications within China and how they are officially translated for the global community, this article highlights the profound contemporary relevance of the revolutionary legacy. Additionally, this study represents a pioneering effort in critical analysis of metaphor in translation in the field of translation studies. It also breaks new ground by extending the conventionally monolingual critical metaphor analysis research. Furthermore, this article contributes significantly to the development of metaphor identification procedures, and its findings may have implications for other disciplines, including Chinese studies.