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Formulaic expressions/prefabricated chunks are established as crucial in fluent speech production in psycholinguistics and language acquisition/learning yet have been largely underexplored in interpreting studies, barring a few experimental studies. Formulaic expressions are particularly underexplored from a discursive perspective in interpreting, that is, how interpreters might employ formulaic expressions for discursive mediation. Drawing on 20 years of China's political press conferences data, this study conducts a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis to explore the ideological/discursive properties of the linguistic category using the N-Gram function. The findings reveal that the interpreters' formulaic language use manifests at multiple levels: Instead of being seemingly routine and innocuous, formulaic expressions used in interpreting can be ideologically salient in (re)constructing versions of truth, fact, and reality, discursively further strengthening China's stance in the global lingua franca English. Contextualised bilingual examples are provided to demonstrate interpreters' mediation. This interdisciplinary study contributes to current understanding of government interpreters' agency in a changing sociocultural and geopolitical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents multimodal metaphors as (re)framing tools in the analysis of a 10-minute promotional video of Hubei Province produced by the Chinese government and circulated on new media platforms like YouTube, Douyin (Chinese Tik Tok) and WeChat Channels. The video introduces Hubei Province to the world in the pre-pandemic, pandemic and post-pandemic stage to erase the prejudiced "Wuhan virus" and "China virus" painted by Western media. Drawing upon MIPVU (the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universitei), multimodality of metaphors, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study analyzes how the Chinese government attempts to reframe Hubei as a place of courage, prosperity and humanity via metaphors like WAR, BRIDGE, HAND and BACK. The benefits and drawbacks of such metaphor usage are also discussed with appropriate contextual and socio-cultural relevancies. The study provides a hands-on practice of the CDA-based analysis of multimodal metaphors and justifies the feasibility of integrating translation, metaphor and semiotic studies through the sociological theory of framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Techno-invasion refers to constant connectivity of being "always exposed" that blurs desired boundaries between work and personal life and represents an emerging phenomenon of scholarly investigation. As work-related use of information technology (IT) during non-work time leads to techno-invasion, a minimal amount is known about whether techno-invasion may engender employees' deviant behaviors, a behavior that violates organizational norms and may be intended to harm the organization, its members, or both. Drawn upon the self-regulation theory, this study examines this relationship by focusing on psychological processes. Based on time-lagged survey data collected from customer service teams from two financial service companies in China, our results show that (1) techno-invasion is associated with self-regulation impairment (i.e., the reduction of one's self-regulatory resources needed to control undesirable impulses), which in turn provokes employee's deviant behavior; (2) perceived team bottom-line mentality (i.e., mindset to prioritize the team bottom-line outcomes) reinforces the relationship between techno-invasion and self-regulation impairment; and (3) IT mindfulness (i.e., employees' focus in being creative using IT, and learning and discovering new and more efficient ways of using IT) negatively moderates the relationship between techno-invasion and self-regulation impairment, thus serving as a remedy to alleviate or prevent self-regulation impairment and employee's deviant behavior. We explain theoretically and test empirically the impact of techno-invasion on employees' deviant behavior, emphasizing the intermediate psychological processes and the boundary conditions that affect this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing the challenges and opportunities brought by the launch of the WeChat subscription account in 2012, Reference News (hereafter RN), a Chinese official news agency publishing selected translated foreign news, has responded quickly, becoming one of the most successful WeChat accounts. Among the various contents produced by RN's WeChat account, there is a type of news report that quotes social media comments posted by foreign netizens on China-related topics. This study investigates the translation of those comments. Using a dataset containing news articles quoting translated comments published between 1 August 2019 and 31 July 2020, we analysed the selection of news topics and comments and investigated the translated comments by drawing on appraisal theory and framing strategies. It was found that RN tends to cover more soft news and quotes positive comments towards China. These selected comments were then rendered and reframed to play up the pro-China stance in the original and presented to the readers with screenshots of their source texts. In a highly marketized, digitalised, and competitive social media context, these strategies have facilitated RN's efforts to represent China's positive global image among foreign netizens to their WeChat account followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luotuo Xiangzi, a renowned modern Chinese novel, successfully portrays a young rickshaw puller in Beijing–Xiangzi. Upon its translation into English at the end of World War II, the protagonist aroused much sympathy from American readers. As a best seller in the United States, the novel has been retranslated many times. A contributing factor to its popularity is the creation of the memorable protagonist. The paper investigates the role of translator positioning in constructing the character. It proposes a systematic framework that incorporates Appraisal and characterisation models. An analysis of the Chinese text and three English translations suggests that the positioning or value orientation adopted by the translators plays a significant role in their characterisation and demonstrates how a mixed model can clarify this interaction. Furthermore, the corpus-based method makes it possible to reveal patterns of translator positioning hidden in the translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study attempts to explore features of explicitation in interpreting by conducting an experiment in which 12 professional and 12 trainee interpreters were invited to carry out English-Chinese (E-C) consecutive interpreting (CI). All the explicitation shifts have been identified through a comparison between the original speech and the interpretations. The study has found 10 different forms of explicitations in E-C CI and summarized four motivations behind them. Features of explicitation found in the study include: (1) half of the explicitations are related to the experiential information; (2) most explicitations are adopted for clarification; and (3) explicitations to make up for interpreters' insufficient competence are common in E-C CI. In addition, the two groups also differ from each other in their explicitation patterns in the following aspects: (1) professional interpreters make considerably more explicitations than trainee interpreters, especially explicitations for clarification; (2) trainee interpreters make more explicitations as strategies to make up for the loss of information in their interpreting; and (3) professionals tend to emphasize the speaker's attitude through the addition of intensifiers more often than their trainee counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TAPs translation research is the application of the think-aloud method to an empirical study of the translator's mental process, and over the past 20 years it has been using students primarily as its subjects. The present paper argues that the think-aloud method can not only be used to investigate students' translation process, it can also be adopted in translator training by the teacher to give students more direct and concrete guidance in translation practice and thus to establish a new interactive mode of translation teaching in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]