Interpreters’ Subjectivity in Diplomatic Interpreting: A Sociosemiotic Analysis of China’s 14th NPC Press Conference
Abstract
This study investigates how interpreters exercise agency in high-stakes diplomatic interpreting, adopting Morris’s (1938) sociosemiotic framework to analyse their role as cultural-political mediators. Drawing on Chinese-English consecutive interpreting data from the 2023 Premier’s press conference of China’s 14th National People’s Congress (NPC), the paper argues that interpreters’ subjectivity manifests across three dimensions of meaning-making: as cultural transcoders navigating referential meanings, as discourse restructurers reconfiguring intra-lingual patterns, and as cultural-political mediators contextualising pragmatic effects. The analysis reveals that interpreters do not merely transfer linguistic content but actively mediate cross-cultural communication through deliberate choices in rendering culturally-specific expressions, restructuring discourse patterns, and navigating politically sensitive content. Diplomatic interpreters balance fidelity to source messages with adaptations necessary for target audience comprehension, particularly when handling Chinese political idioms, parallel rhetorical structures, and culturally embedded metaphors. These findings extend our understanding of diplomatic interpreting as a complex act of cross-cultural negotiation rather than mere linguistic transfer, with significant implications for interpreter training and conceptualising interpreters’ agency in high-stakes political communication. Future research could examine the universality of these patterns across different language pairs and interpreting modalities.
Keywords: Diplomatic interpreting; Interpreters’ subjectivity; Sociosemiotics; Cross-cultural communication; Political discourse
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