Translational Perspectives on Corpus-based Conceptual Analysis

This presentation draws on work for an ongoing book project, first elaborated in a proof-of-concept article in the European Journal of International Security (Livesey 2023). The book argues for greater sensitivity to the relationship between past and present in analysing evolutions of political practice. The book introduces a framework for conceptualising this relationship, synthesised through a rereading of Annales and genealogical traditions of historical thought. And it applies this framework to tell the story of evolutions in British state security and peacebuilding practice during the years of the Northern Ireland conflict known as the ‘Troubles’ (1969-1998). This presentation focuses on the methodology by which this story is told: namely, a corpus-assisted discourse analysis combining corpus linguistic methods of keyness and collocation analysis (applied to a new corpus capturing all UK parliamentary debates on Northern Ireland, 1920-1972), with qualitative archival methods (exploring the design and delivery of new counter-terrorism and peacebuilding schemes during the Troubles). This methodology illuminates the remarkable stability of concepts used by British political actors in making sense of Northern Ireland, in the decades leading up to its conflict, and opens the door to a new theoretical framework for tracing politics’ roots across a deeper longue durée. It also serves as an innovative template for undertaking historically-informed conceptual analysis across social sciences.

Speaker bio

Dr Michael Livesey is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, based at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics and International Relations. His research explores the genealogy of British security and peacebuilding politics in Northern Ireland. He has published on the use of corpus linguistics in social science and literature studies in journals including the European Journal of International Security, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and the Journal of Tolkien Research. He is currently engaged in writing a book applying corpus linguistic and archival methods to connect Troubles-era evolutions in UK state counter-terrorism and peacebuilding practice to the longer durée of British political discourse on (Northern) Ireland.

Much work has been done to counter dehumanising discourses about HIV/AIDS patients by opting for non-stigmatising, people-first and gender-inclusive language, such as ‘people living with HIV or AIDS’ and ‘contracted’ or ‘acquired’ instead of ‘infected’. Similarly, ‘key populations’ is adopted by some international organisations, such as The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health Organization (WHO), in lieu of ‘high-risk groups’. Despite such efforts, however, little research has been conducted to examine the extent to which the policies and guidelines of international initiatives and organisations beyond the English-speaking world have been translated, implemented and practised in different cultures. More importantly, relatively scant attention has been paid to bottom-up local programmes and movements that seek to effect change in dominant discourses about people living with HIV. This study examines how phrases such as ‘living with HIV’ and ‘key populations’ are linguistically and conceptually translated into Korean. It first draws on the Sustainability and HEalth (SHE) corpus to establish how HIV-vulnerable groups are referred to in transnational health organisations. It will then investigate the terms adopted by government agencies in Korea, such as the Korea Federation for AIDS Prevention, using a custom-built Korean corpus to conduct in-depth comparative textual analysis of the data. Finally, I will investigate the alternative terms used by activist groups, including the Korean Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS and Society for LGBT Human Rights of Korea, to shed some light on  the politics of language and translation in the sphere of activism.

Speaker bio

Kyung Hye Kim is Assistant Professor at Dongguk University, South Korea. She conducts interdisciplinary research on the various ways in which translation impacts and shapes cross-cultural communication and challenges dominant discourses in society, particularly in the areas of corpus-based translation studies and in audiovisual translation. She is a member of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, and Chair of the Conference Committee of IATIS, the International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies, and Chair of the International Cooperation Committee of the Korean Association for Translation Studies.

Subject and subjectification are understood, as proposed by Foucault, as a “technique of power, a way of exercising power by allocating subject positions that predetermine answers to the question of “who are we?” (1982, p. 781). In Saldanha (2024) I argue that medicines are the main subjects that Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Policy aims to protect; in other words, the aim of the policy is to save medicine(s). The analysis follows Bacchi’s (2009) methodology for subjectification processes in policy discourse, complemented by van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework for the analysis of discourse as social praxis. I argue that subjectification can also take the form of allocating subject positions to commodities, such as medicines (Saldanha, 2024). In this presentation, using the Sustainability and HEalth Corpus (SHE), I compare the results presented in Saldanha (2024) with how medicine and medicines are conceptualised in debates about the legalisation of abortion in the US and Ireland, and with the conceptualisation of the Spanish ‘medicina’ and ‘medicinas’ in the debate about abortion in Argentina. The aim of the analysis is to reveal similarities and differences between the associations triggered by concepts that are common sense equivalents in two languages, when they are employed in different health contexts.

Speaker bio

Gabriela Saldanha is a Researcher at the Sustainable Health Unit (SustainIT), University of Oslo, where she works in several projects supporting the development of the Sustainability and HEealth (SHE) Corpus. She is Project Manager for the Erasmus+ Partnership for Cooperation, Debating Democracy, and one of the co-investigators on the MEDRA project, funded by UiO-Democracy. Before joining the University of Oslo, Saldanha worked as a lecturer in translation studies at the University of Birmingham and at Imperial College London. Saldanha continues being an active researcher in the field of Translation Studies. She is an elected member of the IATIS Executive Council and member of the steering committee in the AHRC-funded Feminist Translation Network, led by Hilary Brown and Olga Castro.

The second half of the nineteenth century marked an intensive effort by Chinese elites to learn from the West as a strategy to prevent China from collapsing under Western imperialism. For cultural leaders of the time, the most urgent task was nation-building. This talk explores the multiple meanings of guomin (国民, “nation-people”) as a central concept in fostering a sense of nationhood within traditional Chinese society. The term guomin, introduced as a neologism, was borrowed from Japan, which had adapted it largely from the German concept of Volk. Chinese elites employed guomin as a discursive tool to redirect people’s loyalties away from familial and clan ties toward the (nation-)state. Drawing on a corpus analysis of approximately 250,000 words from a high-profile press debate between 1905 and 1907, this talk examines how guomin functioned as a flexible and powerful mode of discourse. It highlights how the term was used to articulate the necessity of transforming traditional Chinese society into a modern nation-state.

Speaker bio

Qing Cao is Professor and Director of Chinese Studies, and Director of the Centre for Comparative Modernities at Durham University, UK. His research interests include China’s modern intellectual history, politics and the mass media, as well as mutual perceptions between China and the West. He is the author of The Language of Nation–State Building in Late Qing China (Routledge, 2023) and China under Western Gaze (World Scientific, 2014), and co-editor of Utopia and Modernity in China (Pluto, 2022), Brand China in the Media (Routledge, 2020), and Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China (John Benjamins, 2014).