War metaphor in Chinese political-institutional discourse and its official Spanish translation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35622/Keywords:
Chinese–Spanish translation, discourse framing, parallel corpus, political discourse, war metaphorAbstract
This study examined war metaphor in Chinese political-institutional discourse on the basis of a parallel corpus drawn from Volume IV of Xi Jinping tan zhiguo lizheng (2022) and its official Spanish translation, Xi Jinping: La gobernación y administración de China (2023). The analysis relied on aligned Chinese–Spanish units that made it possible to identify the dominant subdomain and the associated discursive function in the source text. Translation decisions were classified into three strategies: frame preservation, reframing, and demetaphorization or explicitation. The analysis showed that indicators of the WAR domain were mainly clustered in repertoires related to planning and confrontation. In the Spanish version, frame preservation was observed when the framing coincided with already stabilized uses in Spanish political discourse, whereas reframing and explicitation were used in segments with higher figurative density or when the image could acquire greater visibility for Spanish-speaking readers. The results indicated that translation was not accounted for by the binary opposition between preserving and eliminating the metaphor, but rather by a continuum of adjustment guided by the segment’s discursive function, in which microtextual choices of formulation modulated the frame’s visibility and its pragmatic effect in Spanish.
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