The discursive construction of China in US institutional translation (1979–2025)

Abstract

This study examines how Interpret: China , a translation archive project hosted by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, shapes what counts as China for policy-facing publics while presenting its work as enabling “objective understanding.” Drawing on 335 parallel Chinese source texts and English translations spanning 1979 to 2025, the study argues that ideological meaning is produced less through systematic source–target divergence than through institutional translation-as-curation . Employing a corpus-based discourse-historical approach within the framework of critical discourse analysis, the study bridges linguistic and sociohistorical analysis to explore intersections of discourse, power, and ideology. The methodology integrates quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, uncovering patterns across genres, topics, authors, sources, and tags. Findings show that the archive repeatedly renders China legible through geopolitical–security competition and economic development frames, with episodic spikes around Taiwan and military tensions. Concordance analysis reveals a recurring affective register of grievance, urgency, and threat management that is often preserved in faithful translations yet can be reoriented through institutional framing. The discourse-historical approach, combined with corpus methods, enables triangulation across diverse data sources and methods, offering an integrative framework for analyzing how translation archives participate in the cultural politics of geopolitical knowledge.