Binhua, Wang and Munday, Jeremy, eds. (2021): Advances in Discourse Analysis of Translation and Interpreting. London/New York: Routledge, 241 p.

Discourse analysis models have gained increasing popularity in translation and interpreting in the last decade and serve as a useful way of uncovering and explaining ideology hidden in the source and target texts. This popularity has been achieved through books, book chapters, conferences and different special issues of academic journals, such as Target, 27(3) (Munday and Zhang 2015) and Meta, 65(1) (Munday and Calzada Pérez 2020). These works present a good example of the interdisciplinary collaboration of discourse analysis (DA) and Translation and Interpreting Studies (T&I). I have found several influential works suggestive of this merging trend of DA and T&I Studies dating back to the 1990s (for example, Hatim and Mason 1990; 1997; Munday 2012). In 2016, Munday explained that effort would be needed to conduct “contrastive discourse analysis on non-European languages” (Munday 2016: 160). Binhua Wang and Jeremy Munday follow this idea, with Advances in Discourse Analysis of Translation and Interpreting being a recent attempt at this path of exploration. With this new book, the editors remind us that DA has a valuable role to play in political discourse translation and interpreting, news translation as well as multimodal and intersemiotic analysis in translation. Their aim is to “further explore how linguistic analysis can be linked to the wider target text function and how socio-cultural studies can be better validated with detailed textual and discoursal analysis” (p. 1). To this end, the two editors selected works that use different theoretical models and a wide array of methodologies. The book is divided into four parts: uncovering positioning and ideology in translation and interpreting (Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4), linking linguistic analysis with socio-cultural interpretation (Chapters 5 and 6), discourse analysis of news translation (Chapters 7, 8 and 9) and analysis of multimodal and intersemiotic discourse in translation (Chapters 10 and 11). In Chapter 1, Binhua Wang adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis of the presentation, re-presentation and perception of a Chinese political concept (the “Belt and Road Initiative”). In his study, Wang compares keyword lists and provides a thesaurus sketch of the top keywords in the corpus. It is found that the positive image of the Belt and Road Initiative is mainly constructed in the re-presented discourse and that neutral and negative images are mainly constructed in the perceived discourse. This study sheds new light on the role of discourse analysis in image building and on the mediation role of translation in international media communication. In Chapter 2, Fei Gao examines how interpreters manipulate evaluative resources to reconstruct a target text discourse. To this end, Gao uses Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory as her theoretical model. It is found that the attitude and graduation categories show evaluative shifts in simultaneous conference interpreting. Gao believes that the translation shifts strengthen the positive values of the source texts (STs) and mitigate the negative values of the STs as well as “risky” discourse replete with negativity. In Chapter 3, Chonglong Gu adopts a corpus-based CDA of the interpreters’ mediation of Beijing’s version of truth, fact and reality. The data employed here are the transcribed bilingual premier’s press conference in China (1998-2017). Believing that the metadiscourse markers this/the fact that is suggestive of the speaker/interpreter’s stance, Gu conducts a concordance analysis of this/the fact that using the software Antconc and then presents a very detailed comparative analysis of the isolated concordance lines of this/the fact that and their Chinese counterparts. Gu’s analysis leads him to conclude that the interpreters’ recurrent addition of metadiscourse markers helps “the Chinese premier’s already authoritative remarks appear even more convincing, trustworthy and rhetorically forceful” (p. 51). …