Mario Bisiada

I take a heteroglossic view of language, that is, I consider any utterance as consisting of various social languages and voices, and as always referring to previous utterances as well as anticipating future ones. Following Bakhtinian thought, the integrational linguistics programme (R. Harris) and Critical Applied Linguistics (A. Pennycook), I see language as an abstraction of spatio-temporally unique communication events that are always inseparable from social context and ideology. I'm interested in language issues that arise from such a conception of language, for instance, phenomena of discourse and translation, always aiming to have a strong basis in critical theory, specifically social constructionist, feminist and post-structuralist approaches to power and ideology. I study language as a subversive and transformational practice to challenge established power relations. Languages and nations came into existence at the same time, reinforcing each other as imagined communities (Andersen), so the existence of nations, languages and linguistic communities as constructed, idealised concepts should be present in any linguistic analysis. I thus see language, or languaging, its use, learning and teaching, as a culturally productive activity, creating and not just reflecting social reality. The study of language I'm most interested in is thus driven by three main motives: First, it has a strong critical element, the desire to use research to achieve a change in society. Second, it is also empirical, drawing on corpora, though not limiting itself to corpus linguistics and its focus on method, but rather using corpora as a means to an end. And third, it must include a strong interdisciplinary aspect, seeing language as fundamentally related to disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and others.

Cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse studies is a growing field of research, especially due to the increasing importance of social media for politics and society and the availability of social media corpora. I'm interested in how political and social issues are constructed, driven and represented through linguistic devices such as hashtags and metaphors and how these practices work to establish and maintain power relations in society. Economic issues are often referred to using metaphors from the domain of education, for instance, “doing homework”, “model pupil” and “learning lessons”.
In a corpus-assisted study of German and English newspapers, published in Discourse & Society, I argue that the expression is a structural metaphor and an understatement, presenting complex issues in an oversimplifying manner. I show that the metaphor (not) doing homework is used to refer to economic issues and has thus become a regular instrument in asserting relations of power and authority in political discourse.
I have also published a chapter where I study the #MeToo hashtag, analysing its regular collocates and the evaluative stance displayed towards it in Twitter discourse across languages. I find that #MeToo seems to be talked about in more negative terms in German tweets compared to English and Spanish, as shown by a qualitative analysis of evaluative author stance.
Along with my PhD student Xiang Huang, I have co-authored an article in CADAAD Journal analysing how Chinese media discourse constructs for itself an authoritative position, educating about obesity as a national health issue. This happens mainly along traditional collectivist lines using war and journey metaphors, but also appealing to more neoliberal, individualist attitudes with financial metaphors.
I have published two conceptual articles, where I reflect on the role of discourse on social media and some discursive structures of exclusion (published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications) that were apparent during the pandemic in Germany, Spain and other countries. I argue that discursive struggle was often constructed along ideological lines, while the role of class conflict was ignored, which contributed to the social polarisation that was perceived by many across countries (article in Media and Communication).

Blog publications

From soldiers to scapegoats: Why blaming citizens in the pandemic may help extremist parties (4 November 2020, Discover Society)
“While the beginning of the pandemic was marked by warlike discourse, constructing a situation of an ‘all-bets-are-off, anything-goes approach to emerging victorious’, addressing citizens as ‘soldiers’ to rally them together to ‘fight’ the ‘invisible enemy’, the discourses surrounding the ‘second wave’ have little to do with community and more with mutual recrimination. Having left war metaphors behind, politicians, helped by a largely sensationalist media, pit people against each other, identifying particular groups such as migrants, youths or ‘deniers” and placing blame on them for each surge in cases.”

Aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn? (8 April 2020, Der Freitag)
Die Verwendung von „räumlicher“ statt „sozialer“ Distanzierung unterstützt die Illusion, man könne Menschen mittels sozialer Medien nah bleiben. Eine Sprachanalyse zu social distancing.

Les metàfores de guerra durant la Covid-19: un recurs enverinat (7 April 2020, Pensem)
L'ús de llenguatge bel·licita per gestionar la crisi empeny les societats democràtiques envers l'autoritarisme. En comptes de parlar d'un «enemic» que ens ataca, es pot entendre el virus com un procés, semblant a un riu.

Corona, Lockdowns, and civil liberties: why participation and debate is important (20 March 2020, Discover Society)
“As a linguist, for instance, I’m interested in the language used in the current discourse. The corona crisis is interesting in this respect, not just because previously uncommon phrases have entered our daily vocabulary basically overnight (“social distancing”, “self-isolation”, “flatten the curve”), but also with respect to the metaphors used to talk about the crisis. The coronavirus has so far mainly been framed in terms of warfare metaphors.”

Eine Metapher, sie zu knechten (23 October 2018, Der Freitag)
Die Benutzung der Metapher “Hausaufgaben machen” suggeriert ungleiche Machtverhältnisse und ersetzt Debatte durch moralische Verpflichtung. So fördert sie den Populismus.

When we talk about phenomena of translated language, we usually equate translated language with the language we find in translated books, magazines, newspapers or other such published translations. What we often forget is that in the production of translated documents, there are many intermediate stages such as revision, editing or proofreading where the language in the text is changed, sometimes significantly. While some phenomena like sentence splitting are caused by both translators and editors alike (see my article in Applied Linguistics), I also show in this book chapter that translators and editors are linguistic actors that are guided by noticeably different purposes. On the one hand, they both make extensive changes to nominalisations (see my article in The Translator), which I have shown in this article published in Perspectives to happen especially when the nominalisation is postmodified, for instance by genitive attributes. On the other hand, editors also eliminate passive constructions from translations, especially when the verb is in the past tense (article published in Across Languages and Cultures). With respect to a proposed “mediation effect”, it seems that translating and editing are rather different activities. Thus, I argue for a greater inclusion of unedited texts in translation corpora (see my article published in Target).

This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity through my participation in the MODEVIGTRAD project (FFI2014-57313-P, 2016−2018).

This project seeks to advance research on the role of translation as a key mechanism of migration control and on the study of cross-linguistically existent discourse patterns. The main research objectives are

1. to identify frames of migration and of translation in contact zones of migration in Spain and Germany, and to investigate whether particular frames can be observed cross-linguistically, which would imply the existence of cross-nationally identifiable discourse patterns or narratives on migration
2. to analyse how these frames shape narratives of migration and of translation that are observable in both individual agents working in contact zones of migration and in organisational processes of translation in those zones

While extensive scholarly work exists on how immigration is framed in the media, it is with the recent rise of populism in Europe that the language employed by politicians and echoed in the media is increasingly becoming a pan-European topic of both interest and concern. Conservative parties increasingly adopt extreme right-wing terminology, thus shifting the limits of acceptability further and further towards a xenophobic consensus. Discursive means of manipulation or presenting subjective opinion as objective truths have become frequent strategies.
While the media play a key role in shaping the discourse on immigration and determining which frames are used and perpetuated, much work remains to be done to investigate how particular frames are introduced and established, and especially how this shapes a cross-linguistic, pan-European discourse. Recent calls to fund research within EU Horizon 2020 programme have placed emphasis on the discourse around the concept of migration and its socio-economic effects on host societies, such as distribution and impact of migration, migrant integration and education, or mobility patterns and security risks, among others. However, the centrality of language, and as a result of translation as an act of mediation that allows migrants to navigate their environment and fully participate in everyday life has been ignored. These approaches to the study of migration and its relationship to language are central to understanding migration processes within the European Union from a geopolitical perspective.
The specific objectives to be addressed by this project are:

1. to identify through quantitative and contrastive data analysis the most recurrent frames on migration and translation to examine the connection between these two concepts
2. to conduct a qualitative analysis of author stance and positioning towards migration in those recurrent frames
3. to identify, through ethnographic methods of data collection and qualitative content analysis, public narratives of migration and of translation in the three areas mentioned above, and to evaluate the extent to which frames identified in RO2 shape such narratives
4. to establish a connection between narratives of migration and of translation, and evaluate the extent to which such narratives contribute to the use of acts of translation as key strategic tools for control of migration

The Frames and Narratives of Translation and of Migration in Europe (FANTAME) research project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2019-107971GA-I00, 2020−2024).

This project is further funded by a postdoctoral grant from Pompeu Fabra University's inter- and trans-disciplinary Planetary Wellbeing initiative.

Translation as a site of language contact can play a role in language change. I'm interested in the effects that the contact of two languages both in the mind of the translator and in that of the reader can have on each other. In my PhD project, I have concentrated on the analysis of parataxis and hypotaxis in English−German translation, which has found some evidence for a diachronic decrease of hypotactic constructions in causal (article published in Languages in Contrast) and concessive clauses (article published in Text & Talk) in translated language, although this trend is not corroborated in non-translated language. As I report in those articles, there does seem to be a trend towards a greater use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions in German business articles, which may well have been affected by language contact in translation.

Metaphorical representations of obesity in Chinese media (2010-2019)

Xiang Huang, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (submitted)
This project aims to conduct a corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis of the representation of obesity in Chinese media over the past decade (2010-2019). Comparing representations of obesity in China’s authority-controlled official media and in its market-oriented social media, I will explicate the intricate relations among language and visual cues, body-related ideologies and socio-political contexts on the discussion of obesity in post-reform China. Through an integration of the theories and methods from multimodal critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies and conceptual metaphor analysis, I will examine how obesity has been discursively extended from a biomedical issue to a social-therapeutic and further a cultural-political one in China. To the best of my knowledge, this project is the first of its kind to examine the multimodal (linguistic and visual) discourses surrounding obesity in Chinese media. It thus offers a timely response to the need for more research which explores obesity in the non-Western context to elucidate contextual nuances of obesity in China. The originality of the project can also be found at theoretical and methodological levels as I set out to demonstrate how an integrative orientation combining multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and metaphor analysis can enhance health discourse analysis in Chinese, an under-researched language in this area.

Related publications

Huang, Xiang. forthcoming. Metaphor, stance and obesity in the People’s Daily. In J.I. Marín, L. Hidalgo & J.R. Zamorano (eds), Stance, inter/subjectivity and identity in discourse. Peter Lang

Huang, Xiang & Mario Bisiada. 2021. Is obesity just a health issue? Metaphorical framings of obesity in the People’s Daily. CADAAD Journal 13(2). 18−39.

Analysing reader-writer relationship and technicality of vocabulary in multilingual health information websites

Amy Dara Hochberg, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 5)
The purpose of this PhD thesis is to determine, via a corpus study of technicality of vocabulary and writer-reader role relationship whether multilingual health communication websites in English, Spanish, French, Catalan, and Hebrew are appropriately written with regard to health literacy, and whether each cultural population would receive the health information equally as intended. This study questions whether, first, the two pragmatic determinants in multilingual health communication websites are at an adequate level for the lay reader, and second, whether the determinants reflect the cultural values of the writer or have been adapted to those of the target audience.

Related publications

Hochberg, Amy Dara. 2021. Analyzing pragmatic elements in health information websites. In M.F. Alexandre et al. (eds), Selected papers from the 29th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference (ESFLC2019), 225−255. Polytechnic of Leiria.

Traducción de metáforas del chino al español en La fortaleza asediada − estudio basado en un corpus paralelo

Hongying Li, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 3)
Wei Cheng se cuenta entre las novelas chinas modernas más importantes, y contiene una gran cantidad de metáforas interesantes. De hecho, la metáfora puede servir como un portador cultural importante y una herramienta cognitiva en un idioma, y su presentación en otro idioma afectará la comprensión de los lectores del idioma de destino sobre la sociedad y la cultura china. Sin embargo, hasta la fecha, hay poco estudio sobre la traducción chino−español de las metáforas, por lo que un estudio sistemático de una novela rebosante de metáforas será muy significativo para esta cuestión. Este proyecto tiene el objetivo de analizar de manera descriptiva cómo se han traducido las metáforas de Wei Cheng en su versión española La fortaleza asediada. En primer lugar, identificaremos las metáforas de acuerdo con el criterio de MIPVU. En segundo lugar, en función de los fenómenos de la traducción, desenredaremos los métodos específicos de traducir las metáforas y observaremos si muestran una tendencia a la estrategia de “domesticación” o “extranjerización”. En tercer lugar, intentamos encontrar unas posibles correspondencias entre los diferentes tipos de metáforas chinas y sus traducciones. En cuarto lugar, determinaremos los cambios de los dominios de origen y destino de las metáforas en el texto original y el texto de destino desde una perspectiva cognitiva. Por último, analizaremos las razones detrás de estas decisiones de traducción desde el punto de vista del “cotext” y socio-cultural. La originalidad de este proyecto también se puede encontrar en el aspecto metodológico, puesto que demostrará que el MIPVU puede identificar no solo las metáforas chinas a nivel léxico, sino también a nivel sintagmático y textual, el cual será un avance para la aplicación del MIPVU a la lengua china.

Related publications

Li, Hongying. 2022. La traducción inglesa y española de la metáfora EL SER HUMANO ES UN ANIMAL en Weicheng: Un estudio contrastivo desde la perspectiva cognitiva. Estudios de Traducción 12, 163−171.

Linguistic representations of trans identities in the Turkish press: A corpus-based discourse analysis

Seda Karanfil, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 3)
The research focuses on one of the most vulnerable groups in Turkey, trans individuals, and how their identities are addressed by reiterative semantic patterns employed by a selection of mainstream and independent Turkish newspapers. The initial part will scrutinise the system of norms and values prevalent in the Turkish society with a cultural, religious, political and historical approach. Subsequently, the seminal features and functions of the Turkish newspapers, constituent components of the upcoming corpus, will be investigated. Particularly, the discrepancies between the mainstream and independent press will be focussed on, and it is expected that this descriptive analysis will facilitate the comprehension of the Turkish context, which is relatively disparate in comparison to the western one. This qualitative analysis will be followed by a quantitative one. In a narrower sense, a terminological analysis of trans words such as trans individual (which stands for transgender in Turkish), transsexual, trans and transvestite will be carried out by reference to frequency lists, concordances and collocations. The aim of this semantic prosody analysis is to spot the terminological choices frequently utilised by the Turkish press and to discern whether they are represented favourably or unfavourably while negotiating trans identities. In a broader sense, the news articles/reports comprising the future corpus will be analysed by using the social actors approach of Van Leeuwen. The timespan for the selection of news articles/reports is expected to be between 2016 and 2020 regarding the fact that the press and freedom of speech passed to a different phase with the 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey.

Exclusion from discourse and the construction of knowledge in an era of cancel culture: A critical analysis

Wade Raaflaub, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 2)
Cancel culture is the practice, particularly on social media, of criticising and withdrawing support for a public figure after they have said or done something perceived to be inappropriate or offensive, by attempting to reduce the power and efficacy of their fame, popularity or platform. The objective of this research is to study how the discourse surrounding cancel culture informs the underlying power struggles between privileged and marginalised segments of society, and the shaping of Western liberal and conservative ideologies as they relate to matters such as equality, diversity and free speech. In the context of three case studies involving English language media commentary about three public figures criticised for their views on sensitive and controversial topics, the overarching research questions aim to answer how cancel culture has excluded topics, and the expression of particular views and opinions about those topics, from discussion within public discourse, and how cancel culture has influenced the interpretation of what is true versus false, or right versus wrong, and therefore the construction of knowledge about particular topics. Within the framework of critical discourse studies, the methodologies of dispositive analysis and the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, both in the tradition of Foucault, will be applied. Among the linguistic features to be examined within the discourse surrounding cancel culture are lexical choices, rhetorical devices, and argumentation strategies.

Measuring loss and gain in translation: Another look at translatability

Peter Till, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 1)
The need for translation quality assessment (TQA) has soared along with the need for translation. Teachers assess translation students’ work to determine mastery of the source language and target language. Clients want assurance of quality when they commission a translation to ensure that the translation is worth the cost. But how should translation quality be assessed? In order to avoid subjective opinions, objective evaluations should be used. However, currently there is no empirical method to measure the accuracy of a translation, or even an objective metric that can be used to provide insight into any specific accuracy issues. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to establish a method that can be used to empirically measure the accuracy of a translation based on the evaluation of any loss or (undue) addition of meaning features when an expression is translated. Through the use of an enhanced componential analysis, the proposed method provides a numerical value that greatly reduces the subjectivity of TQA. The proposed method will be itself evaluated through a comparison of the results of two groups of linguists that assess the accuracy of a series of translations where one group will be left to their own devices, and the other will be instructed to use the method proposed herein. The implications of the results of this research are far-reaching. Often translation quality assessment is highly subjective, even when based on a solid theoretical framework. Thus, a method that provides empirical results that remove a large portion of subjectivity from the assessment process would allow for more clarity and agreement on translation quality.

Tone tags: The linguistic method for conveying tones from written material on social media

Shahrad Alejandro Ghalili, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 1)

Linguistic representations of presidential inaugural addresses in Taiwan: A corpus-based discourse analysis

Yu Shen Cheng, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 1)
This research project aims at discovering how linguistic representations are constructed in the inaugural addresses by the sixth to fifteenth presidents of Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, Lee Teng-hui, Chen Shui-bian, Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen, according to their executive orders, based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. The inaugurations of the presidents listed above individually present different modern political historical periods, as well as marking milestones in the Taiwanese democratisation process, from dictatorship to democracy. In order to compare linguistic representations according to the democratic timeline, the research project will utilise a diachronic approach to analyse how linguistic representations are constructed differently across time with the intention to understand how linguistic mechanisms such as transitivity and social actor analysis influence the citizens' interpretation of the notion of sovereignty and regime governing the island, as well as the relation between the State and citizenship.

A comparative discourse analysis of how Chinese and Western news reports construct the “trafficking for marriage”

Qianqian Wu, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 1)
This thesis critically analyses news discourse on the topic of trafficking women for marriage cases in China. The “chained women” case came to light in 2022 and attracted a lot of attention, quickly stirring up discussion and reflection on gender inequality in society, especially among female groups. It was summarised as a symbolic crime of gender violence and was massively covered by both Chinese and Western media. The data selected for this study comes from official Chinese media (People's Daily, China Women's Daily, China News Service, etc.), unofficial Chinese media (WeChat public accounts), and Western media (Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, etc.). Using computer techniques, this study firstly uses a methodology from Critical Discourse Analysis, namely framing theory, to explore how trafficking for marriage was defined and how participants are named and represented in news discourse. It then draws on Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) to find if there is a divergence in their use of the news values, to reveal and compare how three kinds of media construct news values through language to achieve their purposes. This study's corpus-assisted qualitative approach and quantitative analysis in combination with the political and cultural contexts are designed to discover the underlying ideologies in the news discourse and the ideological conflicts, which fills a research gap in the comparative study of gender violence crime news discourse from both Asian and Western media. The implications of the power of languages from three directions for the development of women's rights and gender equality in China will be discussed.

A multimodal critical discourse analysis of political cartoons in Pakistan

Madiha Munawar, PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (year 3)
The aim of this study is to explore the linguistic and discursive strategies used by media groups of different political affiliations in their use of political cartoons, which serve to malign one political party while saving face of the other. The media plays an important role in controlling the minds of people to manipulate a situation. This study focuses on the linguistic and visual analysis of political cartoons published from the 2018 elections in Pakistan to today. The project will use Van Dijk's (1997) framework in order to analyse hidden ideologies in those cartoons and investigate the ways they are used as communicative tools in online and print media to produce significant meaning on dominant political themes. The study builds on a previous semiotic analysis (Shaikh et al., 2016) of political cartoons published during the campaign of the general election in 2013 in Pakistan. Studying cartoons has been shown to be important to explore hidden ideologies. Political cartoons are utilised as rhetorical, social, cultural and political devices and are in need of being studied on micro as well as meso and macro levels. They are also generally produced and published due to some conflict of interest by different groups, reflecting their different ideologies and identities. In this study I will explore and analyse the conflict between the various groups through discourse analysis.