Exploring Discursive Performativity – A Corpus-based Study of News Coverage and Translation

Recent studies in the subject of performativity in translation studies have provided a vast array of approaches to the investigation of acts through language. While many of them focus on theatre and literary translation, it is worth noting that news discourse also has an embedded performative nature through which the ideological construction of a contending truth-claim about reality is established. This kind of discursive performativity can be observed in the processes of production and translation of news as they involve endorsing and/or suppressing a particular ideology by means of linguistic choices of lexical grammatical, sematic and syntactic aspects. Both processes are mediated by trans-editors as performers and subjected to the similar determinants, such as the institutional force, situational background and the wider social power. Seeing news discourse as a form of performative social practice, this study aims to explore how performative power of news is achieved through the ideological workings of language and discursive construction of us- and them- groups, and find out what is behind this performative power in the larger historical and sociocultural contexts. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and speech act theory, the study will adopt Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytical tool. Specifically, it will analyze a corpus of original and translated news discourse collected from China Daily, South China Morning Post and The New York Times on the topic of Edward Snowden in order to (1) examine and compare the linguistic features of transitivity in text pairs on the textual level, (2) demonstrate how news discourse is mediated by trans-editors through the process of reproduction, consumption and distribution on the discursive level, and (3) explain the textual and discursive phenomena within the institutional, situational and social contexts.