Extending the integrated perspective of CDA and CBT beyond metaphors in translation studies: taking the English translation of the 2024 Report on the Work of the Government as an example

The Report on the Work of the Government, an official speech delivered by the Premier of the State Council every year at the second session of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, which reviews the government work in the past year and lays out the overall requirements and policy orientation for economic and social development and the major tasks to be undertaken in the current year, serves as an important resource for understanding the current conditions in China for the rest of the world. Together with its translated versions, the Report plays a key role in the construction of China’s foreign discourse system. The integration of critical and conceptual blending perspectives into translation studies has proven to be a promising academic pursuit for hypothesizing the potential ideological effects on recipients as a result of a series of online blending operations prompted by the (translated) text in their mind, at least as far as metaphorical expressions are concerned. Taking simple words such as the pronoun WE and the proper noun CHINA as examples, this paper aims to demonstrate that such a tripartite disciplinary integration—i.e., translation studies, critical discourse analysis, and conceptual blending theory—can be extended to the analysis of discursive phenomena that are less eye-catching or exotic compared with metaphor.