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Collection Highlights

Empire and Ideology in the Graeco Roman World Selected

Papers Benjamin Isaac

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology

(Routledge Library Editions: Translation Book 2) Lawrence
Venuti

Hindu nationalism in India ideology and politics Bhuwan

Kumar Jha
The Government and Politics of the European Union Nugent

Political Advertising in the 2014 European Parliament

Elections 1st Edition Christina Holtz-Bacha

Ideas Of Power The Politics Of American Party Ideology

Development Verlan Lewis

The Power of Emotion in Politics, Philosophy, and Ideology

1st Edition Hanna Samir Kassab (Auth.)

Is There an End of Ideologies Exploring Constructs of

Ideology and Discourse in Marxist and Post Marxist
Theories António Lopes
Translating the
European House
Translating the
European House:

Discourse, Ideology and Politics

– Selected Papers
by Christina Schäffner

Edited by

Stefan Baumgarten and Chantal Gagnon

Translating the European House:
Discourse, Ideology and Politics – Selected Papers by Christina Schäffner

Edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Chantal Gagnon

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2016 by Stefan Baumgarten, Chantal Gagnon

and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9539-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9539-2
Christina Schäffner
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Tabula Gratulatoria ...................................................................................... x

General Introduction .................................................................................. xii

Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual World ................................. 1

Stefan Baumgarten and Chantal Gagnon

I. Building a European House? Or at Two Speeds into a Dead End?

Metaphors in the Debate on the United Europe (1996) ............................. 30

II. Strategies of Translating Political Texts (1997).................................... 63

III. Where is the Source Text? (1997) ....................................................... 91

IV. Hedges in Political Texts (1998) ....................................................... 109

V. Third Ways and New Centres: Ideological Unity or Difference?

(2003) ...................................................................................................... 128

VI. Metaphor and Translation: Some Implications of a Cognitive

Approach (2004) ...................................................................................... 148

VII. Political Discourse Analysis from the Point of View of Translation

Studies (2004).......................................................................................... 172

VIII. “The Prime Minister said ...”: Voices in Translated Political

Texts (2008) ............................................................................................ 207

IX. Does Translation Hinder Integration? (2009) .................................... 244

X. Crosscultural Translation and Conflicting Ideologies (2010) ............. 264

XI. Intercultural Intertextuality as a Translation Phenomenon (2012) .... 287

viii Contents

XII. Unknown Agents in Translated Political Discourse (2012) ............. 315

Publications by Christina Schäffner ........................................................ 340

Index of Names........................................................................................ 361

Subject Index ........................................................................................... 366

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec –

Société et Culture, and by Bangor University in North Wales. The editors
would also like to thank Adélie O. Coutu (Université de Montréal) for her
help with editing and proofreading the book, as well as Professor Andrew
Chesterman and Professor Paul Chilton for their valuable comments on an
earlier script. Special thanks also go to the following publishing
institutions and individuals, who have kindly granted permission to reprint
each of the twelve essays: John Benjamins Publishing Company
(Amsterdam/Netherlands), Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft (Frankfurt/
Germany), Channel View Publications/Multilingual Matters (Bristol/UK),
Taylor & Francis Group/Routledge (Abingdon/UK), Elsevier B.V.
(Amsterdam/Netherlands), Ingrid Simonnæs (editor of SYNAPS
Fagspråk, Kommunikasjon, Kulturkunnskap), Presses Sourbonne
Nouvelle (Paris/France), Ashgate Publishing (Farnham/UK), Cambridge
Scholars Publishing (Newcastle/UK).
 TABULA GRATULATORIA

ADAB Beverly, Stoke-on-Trent, D’HULST Lieven, Kortrijk,

UK Belgium
AL-HARRASI Abdulla, Muscat, FIEDLER Sabine, Leipzig,
Sultanate of Oman Germany
ASSIS ROSA Alexandra, Lisbon, FLYNN Peter, Ghent, Belgium
Portugal GAGNON Chantal, Montreal,
AUSTERMÜHL Frank, Canada
Birmingham, UK GAMBIER Yves, Turku, Finland
AYYAD Ahmed, Jerusalem, GREMLER Claudia, Birmingham,
Occupied Palestine UK
BAKER Mona, Manchester, UK HALVERSON Sandra, Bergen,
BASSNETT Susan, Norway
Warwick/Glasgow, UK HERMANS Theo, Hemel
BAUMANN Klaus-Dieter, Leipzig, Hempstead, UK
Germany HERTING Beate, Leipzig,
BAUMGARTEN Stefan, Bangor, Germany
Wales HOUSE Juliane, Hamburg,
BENNETT Karen, Lisbon, Portugal Germany
BIEL àucja, Warsaw, Poland HUBSCHER-DAVIDSON
BOASE-BEIER Jean, Norwich, Severine, Manchester, UK
England JAKOBSEN Arnt Lykke,
BREMS Elke, Leuven, Belgium Copenhagen, Denmark
BRUMME Jenny, Barcelona, Spain JÄÄSKELÄINEN Riitta,
CAIMOTTO Maria Cristina, Turin, Savonlinna, Finland
Italy JAWORSKA Sylvia, Reading, UK
CASTRO Olga, Birmingham, UK JETTMAROVÁ Zuzana, Prague,
CHESTERMAN Andrew, Helsinki, Czech Republic
Finland KOSKINEN Kaisa, Tampere,
CHILTON Paul, Lancaster and Finland
Warwick, UK KRISHNAMURTHY Ramesh,
CORNELLA-DETRELL Jordi, Birmingham, UK
Glasgow, UK MACKEVIC Vlad, Birmingham,
DAVIER Lucile, Geneva, UK
Switzerland MALMKJÆR, Kirsten, Leicester,
DELABASTITA Dirk, Namur, UK
Belgium
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics xi

MANZ Stefan, Birmingham, UK SHUTTLEWORTH Mark, London,

MATEO Marta, Oviedo, Spain UK
MEDINA Raquel, Birmingham, SNELL-HORNBY Mary, Vienna,
UK Austria
MEYLAERTS Reine, Leuven, STAFFORD Hélène, Birmingham,
Belgium UK
MILTON John, São Paulo, Brazil STOLZE Radegundis, Darmstadt,
MRGUDOVIC Nathalie, Germany
Birmingham, UK STURGE Kate, Berlin, Germany
MUNDAY Jeremy, Leeds, UK SUDLOW Brian, Birmingham, UK
NORD Christiane, Heidelberg, TCACIUC Luciana Sabina
Germany Mihaela, Birmingham, UK
OLOHAN Maeve, Manchester, UK TIRKKONEN-CONDIT Sonja.
PALOPOSKI Outi, Helsinki, Savonlinna, Finland
Finland TYMOCZKO Maria, Northampton
POLEZZI Loredana, Cardiff, UK MA, USA
PÖCHHACKER Franz, Vienna, TESSEUR Wine, Reading, UK
Austria VAN DOORSLAER Luc,
RAMOS PINTO Sara, Leeds, UK Leuven/Antwerp, Belgium
SALAETS Heidi, Antwerp, WIELANDER Elisabeth,
Belgium Birmingham, UK
SALAMA-CARR Myriam, WODAK Ruth, Vienna, Austria
Manchester, UK WOLF Michaela, Graz, Austria
SCHMITT Peter Axel, Leipzig,
Germany
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Aims of this Book

This book contains a selection of articles on the theme of translation
and politics, written by Christina Schäffner. Spanning a period of 16 years,
the articles assembled here provide an overview of Christina Schäffner’s
outstanding academic achievements in the areas of translation studies and
discourse analysis, and afford a valuable insight into her research, against
the backdrop of European politics from the fall of the Berlin Wall to
current debates on EU enlargement.

The metaphor of the ‘European House’ used in the book title reflects a
shared intellectual stance and cross-European political project that has
grown out of the experiences of two devastating world wars that involved
levels of industrial killing, human suffering and deprivation on a scale
unprecedented in human history. The early architects of a common
European house endeavoured to put aside nationalist egoisms in order to
create a multicultural European space, where political unilateralism and
nationalist xenophobia might one day become a thing of the past. Today,
this cosmopolitan vision is under severe threat from exclusionary politics
and from a transnational elite that subordinates all social progress to the
divisive dictates of international capital and its principles of market
competition. Now, the dismantling of the European Union is seriously
being contemplated, and the old Cold War divide is reappearing. Here in
the UK, above all, loud voices are obliterating the vision of a co-operative
integration across languages and cultures, leading some political
commentators to conclude that “[c]riticism of the EU has been almost
entirely dominated by a chauvinistic Euroscepticism that portrays all
European politics through the absurd prism of outraged national identity
and anti-competitive regulation” (Milne 2013, 98).

Is the concept of a common European house really starting to disappear?

Whilst this remains a moot point, Christina Schäffner’s work, which bears
the hallmarks of a cosmopolitan and integrationist perspective, runs
counter to a narrow-minded outlook on European affairs and to those
vocal strands on the European right that seek to destroy a common
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics xiii

European vision. Christina Schäffner’s scholarship moves beyond national

and cultural boundaries, her work speaks to everyone for whom intercultural
understanding, cross-cultural co-operation and peaceful diplomatic
engagement are more than mere empty slogans. Hers is a Europe-focused
and linguistically diverse perspective on discourse studies, in particular
concerning the study of international political discourse.

Christina Schäffner has been at the forefront of research on translation

and political discourse for the best part of 30 years. Originally from East
Germany, and having begun her studies in applied linguistics in 1969, at
what is now Leipzig University (then Karl Marx University), her research
career took off in the early 1980s with comparative investigations of
political vocabulary. In 1992, she came to Aston University in Birmingham
in the UK, from where she has proactively contributed to the development
and consolidation of the – still very young – disciplines of translation
studies and discourse analysis. She has achieved this through numerous
research publications, the establishment of scholarly networks, and
through a willingness to support and facilitate the careers of students and
young scholars.

A particularly memorable example of Christina Schäffner’s networking

skills revolves around a series of recorded panel debates that were published
in the unusual, yet highly efficient, format of edited proceedings. These
feature positioning papers, key contributions, responses and a record of
comments from the panel discussion (e.g. Schäffner and Holmes 1996,
Schäffner 1999, 2004a). Later, in 2012, friends, colleagues and students
put together a Festschrift in honour of Christina Schäffner’s contribution
to the academic world (Adab, Schmitt, and Shreve 2012). Now that she
has retired, and has been awarded the title Emeritus Professor at Aston
University, the time is ripe to present an anthology that brings together
some of her best work, ‘under one roof’ so to speak. This is particularly
important because to date, her writings have only been accessible in
disparate publications in various parts of the world, some of which can be
difficult to find.

Considering Christina Schäffner’s wide range of writing on translation

and political discourse, the collection presented in this book can, of course,
contain only a selection of her works, but we hope to offer the reader a
representative snapshot. The collection may thus function as a navigational
tool, providing readers with an overview of key themes and developments.
It is likely also to spark interest in, and prompt exploration of, other
xiv General Introduction

aspects of Schäffner’s research, lines of investigation that venture into

diverse fields such as text linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor studies and
translation didactics (for more details, please see the thematic index and
the bibliography of her work at the end of this volume).

We sincerely hope that this anthology will strengthen the area of

political discourse analysis in translation by providing a ‘one-stop-shop’
for articles written by its most prominent scholar. Over the last two
decades or so, translation studies has made its mark by conceptualising
translation as a form of cross-cultural communication that transcends
asymmetrical relations of power, foregrounding issues such as (hegemonic)
power, ideology, language contact and intercultural mediation. Yet only a
handful of scholars truly relate questions of translation to practical politics
(e.g. Hatim and Mason 1991, 1997, Gagnon 2006, Calzada Pérez 2007,
Romagnuolo 2009, Baumgarten 2009). Thus, Christina Schäffner’s
research stands out because she has, consistently over the past 30 years,
helped us to understand how political discourse at the international level
presupposes translation.

In a rapidly globalising world, where the boundaries between domestic

and international politics are increasingly blurred, it is imperative to tackle
the social and diplomatic repercussions of mediated political discourse.
Whilst readers will surely construct their own understandings and
conclusions based on personal trajectories and ideological perspectives,
each paper in this anthology can be read independently of any others.
Besides having direct relevance to scholars and students in translation
studies and (critical) discourse analysis, this collection will also be of
interest to the general public and to researchers in other fields including
(applied) linguistics, (intercultural) communication studies, political
science or the sociology of globalisation. This anthology also lends itself
to use in relevant higher education programmes around the world.

A Scholarly Life Between East and West

Christina Schäffner was born in 1950, in the small town of Schlotheim
in the former German Democratic Republic. Being a contemporary
witness to the effects of World War II on German society, and to an
ideological divide that separated the country for more than 40 years, she
has maintained a keen sense of historical awareness throughout a long
academic career.
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics xv

That career began in Leipzig, when it was part of the GDR, and
ultimately led her to Aston University in Birmingham, in the UK. As a
student and scholar in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, she
witnessed the ideological battles of the Cold War and the eventual demise
of totalitarian socialism. Christina Schäffner’s work as a researcher began
when she worked for the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
at Leipzig University and was inspired by the work of influential scholars
such as Otto Kade (1968), Gert Jäger (1975) and Albrecht Neubert (1985),
a group of people who nowadays are, perhaps somewhat misleadingly,
referred to as the ‘Leipzig School of Translation Studies’. At times,
conducting research in East Germany was challenging, since only a
fraction of the world’s literature was readily available to scholars. In order
to gain access to further material (which was deemed by the authorities to
have been written by the imperialist class enemy), researchers needed
special permission for library access by means of what was then referred
to as a ‘poisoned sheet’ (Giftschein) (Schäffner 2004b, 306).

Translation studies as a discipline began to find its own contours and

identity during the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of scholars such as José
Lambert, Gideon Toury, Peter Newmark and James Holmes. The work of
German scholars also found wide international resonance, for example the
work of Hans Vermeer, Katharina Reiss, Christiane Nord, Paul Kussmaul,
Albrecht Neubert, and that of Christina Schäffner herself. On one hand,
Schäffner’s work evolved in constant dialogue with linguistic paradigms
such as text linguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, cognitive
linguistics and metaphor theory. On the other hand, her work on
translation took its initial inspirations from the so-called Leipzig School of
Translation Studies, and later engaged with West German functionalism
and descriptive systems- and norm-based approaches.

In particular, Christina Schäffner’s scholarly engagement with questions

on the translation of political discourse, helped to raise the profile of the –
still underdeveloped – study of translational phenomena in power politics.
The overarching paradigm of Christina Schäffner’s scholarship, as we the
editors see it, lies in her commitment to discourse-analytical methods.
Moreover, her research collaborations with Paul Chilton (e.g. 1997/2011,
2002a) represent a seminal contribution to the field of political discourse
analysis. Most significantly, this mode of social and linguistic
investigation, with its eye close to the manifold interdependencies across
wider contexts, situations and textual minutiae, is firmly grounded in the
everyday life of political experience and can therefore generate “a specific
xvi General Introduction

kind of empirical evidence, a kind so obvious that it is ignored in political

science and even in political philosophy” (Chilton and Schäffner 2002b,
4).

Our chapter entitled ‘Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual

World’ evaluates Christina Schäffner’s work within its wider historical
and academic contexts. We aim to show the extent to which the above-
quoted ‘specific kind of empirical evidence’ can contribute to a better
understanding of political discourse and its translation (or recontextualisation)
into other discursive domains and languages. We will, specifically, frame
her scholarly oeuvre within its discursive, textual and cross-cultural
dimensions, in an attempt to promote further research based on an
academic legacy that continues to inspire students and scholars around the
world.

Bangor and Montreal,

Stefan Baumgarten and Chantal Gagnon
 POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD

STEFAN BAUMGARTEN
AND CHANTAL GAGNON

This evaluative chapter considers the discursive, textual and

translational dimensions of Christina Schäffner’s scholarly work, with the
intention to inspire and generate ideas for future research. This chapter
emphasises three elements in particular, which are: 1) political discourse
analysis, 2) modes of textual enquiry and 3) the translational significance
of discourses in Europe, and we strive to acknowledge most of Schäffner’s
theoretical influences (which range from text linguistics, pragmatics and
cognitive metaphor theory to political discourse analysis, e.g. Austin 1962,
Searle 1969, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981,
Chilton 2004).

Within the field of translation studies, Schäffner’s work is indissolubly

linked with early East German translation research (Neubert 1985), West
German functionalism (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/2013) and descriptive
translation studies (Toury 1995). Christina Schäffner considers her own
approach to be primarily interdisciplinary, a mode of enquiry that aims “to
break up narrowly conceived disciplinary boundaries and to elaborate,
through the interpretation of examples, aspects that unite disciplines”
(2004b, 311 – our translation). The exceptionally rich array of empirical
examples in Schäffner’s work, and her willingness to sustain constant
dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, are particularly worthy of note.

The following discussion, comprising three subsections, will explore

Christina Schäffner’s work within the context of key historical milestones
from around the 1980s onward, in particular those relevant to international
security discourse as a feature of the Cold War period, German unification
and the collapse of the Communist Eastern bloc, and European politics in
relation to EU enlargement.
2 Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual World

International Security and Peace:

The Discursive Dimension
One of the major outcomes of World War II was the emergence of a
bipolar world order, dominated by two new atomic superpowers. The
stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, each armed to
the teeth and with the metaphorical finger on the red button, loomed as a
threatening shadow over the world. Underpinned by the grand ideological
narratives of liberalism and communism, the Cold War period ended in the
early 1990s with the political bankruptcy of the Soviet Union and its
satellite states.

Christina Schäffner’s early publications appeared during the 1980s in

the former German Democratic Republic. Published mostly in German,
these works prefigured a life-long engagement with the study of political
discourse, as they dealt largely with the semantics of political terminology
(Schäffner 1985, 1986), while also investigating translation-related topics
(Schäffner 1983, 1988). Schäffner’s work emerged during the late Cold
War period, so her thematic interests at the time and into the mid-1990s
may be broadly located in the area of international security discourse and
peace (Wenden and Schäffner 1995). Her research also significantly reflects
the dramatically changing realities that followed German reunification and
the redrawing of political boundaries (Schäffner 1990, 1992a). Indeed
much of her theoretical writing on metaphors as cognitive and ideological
phenomena (1994, 1996c, 1997c), work that remains of lasting interest to
the international research community, has been inspired by these historical
milestones. In the remainder of this subsection, we will flesh out the
discursive dimension that underpins Christina Schäffner’s distinctive
approach to political discourse analysis.

The discursive dimension inherent in Schäffner’s approach may be

identified through a network of complex conceptual constellations, in
particular through key notions such as ideology, discourse and politics. In
critical discourse analysis, the concept of ideology tends to be approached
from a cognitive perspective, as a set of socially shared cognitions.
Leaning on van Dijk’s influential conception, Schäffner (1996b, 2)
describes ideologies as “socially shared belief systems of groups”. As an
analytical construct, ideology remains a widely contested term, and in the
public imagination it continues to have largely negative connotations.
Politicised conceptions of ideology do, in any case, tend to be avoided in
empirically-grounded research.
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics 3

Christina Schäffner’s scholarship attained maturity at a time when

essentialism was gradually but steadily being swept away by waves of
postmodernist thought that dissolved binary social oppositions and
illusions about the fixity of meaning. Out went Saussurian relational
linguistics and Chomskian generative grammar; in came Derridean
deconstruction and Foucauldian discourse theory. In the 1990s, shortly
after the collapse of the Cold War world order, non-essentialist attitudes to
the interpretation of text and talk were not yet as self-evident as they are
held to be now, and only today can we legitimately speak of significant
paradigmatic change across disciplines. While the scientific study of
meaning still wields considerable influence in mainstream linguistics (e.g.
Müller 2016), modern discourse theory presupposes an understanding of
communicative behaviour as discursive action, a scholarly approach that
tends to conform to the non-essentialist principle that meaning is socially
constructed (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1991).

Discourse analysis is possibly the most influential interdiscipline that

mediates across linguistics and other text-based disciplines, especially
disciplines in the social sciences. Discourse analysis, the investigation of
language as social interaction, constitutes a critical paradigm in the
analysis of textual politics, mediating “between linguistic structures as
evident in a text and the social, political, and historical contexts of text
production and reception” (Schäffner 2003, 24). The notion of a ‘critical’
discourse analysis, moreover, highlights the engaged perspective of the
researcher, who seeks to draw attention to those discursive practices that
help us to develop an enhanced – hence, critical – awareness about ideological
positions and power relations in unequal and often discriminatory social
settings.

Specifically, Christina Schäffner’s research can be regarded as a well-

grounded empirical exercise in political discourse analysis, with a sustained
focus on the strategic nature of political communication. For Norman
Fairclough (1995, 74; 133), discourse can be fruitfully investigated along a
three-dimensional matrix comprising “social practice, discoursal practice
(text production, distribution and consumption), and text” whereby the
“connection between text and social practice is seen as being mediated by
discourse practice”. In that light, Schäffner’s work on the discourse of
international relations provides valuable insights into ideological
processes, institutional networks and sociotextual practices as they unfold,
for instance, in global geopolitical strife, in the settings, situations and
4 Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual World

conventions of public communication, and in the discursive and linguistic

patterns of political text and talk. But what exactly is meant by ‘political’?

The concept of politics seems to be most obviously grounded in our

daily lives and struggles. If the Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to
humans as “political animals” (Chilton and Schäffner 1997/2011, 303; see
also Chilton 2004), this points us to the crucial – yet easily forgotten – role
that people themselves play in the negotiation of political values. After all,
“what is considered ‘political’ depends on the participants in the
communicative context” (Schäffner 2004d, 119), so political discourse
analysis places particular emphasis on the identities and ideological
positionings of social actors within institutional hierarchies and networks
of power. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1982/1991, 190 – emphasis original) notion
of politics complements this way of thinking, specifically in the way he
describes the “political field” as regulating behaviour in terms of
competition, population control and the demand to remain committed to
what has been said:

The political field is … the site of a competition for power which is carried
out by means of a competition for the control of non-professionals or, more
precisely, for the monopoly of the right to speak and act in the name of
some or all of the non-professionals. […] In politics, ‘to say is to do’ …
Political speech … commits its author completely because it constitutes a
commitment to action which is truly political only if it is the commitment
of an agent or group of agents who are politically responsible …

In her discourse-analytical and linguistic investigations of political text

and talk, Schäffner mainly scrutinises the discursive behaviour of
‘politically responsible’ agents. In the modern era particularly, politicians
rely on the media to ‘mediate’ their message. Here the notion of
recontextualisation serves as a useful analytical construct to shed light on
the ideological, discursive and political dimensions of international power
politics (cf. also Medina 2010, 164-167, on concepts of ‘discursive
responsibility’ and ‘intercontextuality’). But why focus on this notion?
According to Blackledge (2005, 121), “recontextualisation always
involves transformation, and that transformation is dependent on the goals,
values and interests of the context into which the discursive practice is
being recontextualised”.

Recontextualisation drives the ideological, political and textual

transformations occurring in discourse, and recontextualising practices are
specifically effective in the communicative power-play between the media
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics 5

and political institutions. This view is echoed in Christina Schäffner’s

(2012d, 113) research on the media, given that “processes of
recontextualisation have been investigated in critical discourse analysis,
and there is plenty of evidence that mass media are not neutral reporters,
but that they actively construct and shape representations of politics as a
result of the way they select and structure their discourse”. In the
following, and building on Schäffner’s ideas and empirical data (2008), we
would like to put forward the notion of ‘cross-cultural recontextualisation’
with reference to a long interview granted by Russian President Vladimir
Putin to the international press in June 2007. By reinterpreting Christina
Schäffner’s ideas and favoured concepts, we propose here a discursive
dimension that occurs in the form of a ‘recontextualised recontextualisation’.

An analysis of any stretch of text or talk by default implies

recontextualisation, and an analysis of media discourse adds further layers
of complexity. A political interview takes place at a specific location and
time, and the event is immediately ‘cognitively’ recontextualised by the
individuals present, just as it is later recontextualised, in a more obvious
manner, by media and press representatives in the form of written, radio or
televised communications. There are numerous ideological viewpoints
involved, all of which flow into the language, tone and style of the
resulting press reports, articles, radio talks, news channel summaries, and
so on. Ideologies are manifest in a free-floating web of discursive (i.e.
thematic, attitudinal and linguistically-inflected) constellations that are
habitually invoked by political actors, for instance the tendency by
Russian politicians to either ignore or condemn the expression of gay
rights in their country (e.g. Luhn 2014), or Western politicians’ habitual
refusal to acknowledge that unelected and undemocratic institutions such
as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund impose economic
policies upon poor countries, policies which threaten the world’s
geopolitical stability (Harvey 2005, 87-119).

When analysing discourse, however, contextualisation comes before

recontextualisation. Vladimir Putin’s interview with international press
representatives was recorded on 1 June 2007 in Putin’s private residence,
with simultaneous interpretation provided. This was a high-profile and in-
depth interview lasting many hours, including a dinner with the Russian
President. Here we have a complex situation that involves the meeting of
political actors carrying significant ‘discursive responsibilities’ – these
could be towards their electorate and country or their employers in the
media and their readership. The hallmarks of such a high-profile event,
6 Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual World

furthermore, constitute a confluence of diverse ideological viewpoints and

socioculturally inflected discourse dynamics. A summative description of
the interview’s cross-cultural recontextualisation via an extract from
Spiegel International, the English-language version of the German
magazine Der Spiegel, will serve as a lucid exposition of Christina
Schäffner’s approach to political discourse analysis.

Line Spiegel International

1 Question: What exactly do you want?

Putin: What are we striving for? We want to be heard. We do not exclude

(the possibility) that our American partners might rethink their decision. I
5 think that everyone possesses common sense. But if this does not happen,
we cannot be held responsible for our reciprocal steps. Because it is not us
who have initiated the arms race that is pending in Europe. We want
everyone to understand that we will not assume any responsibility for that.
Nor will we allow ourselves to be blamed if we now improve our strategic
10 nuclear weapons system. This system of missile defence creates the illusion
of being protected, but it increases the possibility of unleashing a nuclear
conflict. So there is a violation, an imbalance of strategic equilibrium in the
world, and in order to provide for the balance we will need to establish
systems that would be able to penetrate the missile defence system.
15
Question: Why are the Americans so obstinate about putting these plans
into practice, if it is so clear that they are unnecessary?

Putin: Possibly this is to push us to make reciprocal steps in order to avoid

20 further closeness of Russia and Europe. I am not stipulating that, but I
cannot exclude this possibility. But if it is so, then it is another mistake
again.

This stretch of text constitutes a prime example of cross-cultural

recontextualisation. Let us break this down with reference to the analytical
dimensions of discourse, ideology, and politics.

First, discursive interaction is historically and spatiotemporally

grounded. Discourses, however, are never stable or fixed, they constitute
an integral link to argumentation patterns and modes of rhetorical
composition. Discourses are thematic nodes in an (endless) universe of
possible themes, all of which may be strategically applied, foregrounded
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics 7

or backgrounded, by actors in the geopolitical arena. So, what would the

effects of reading this piece of text be upon an average reader? The extract
may be broadly associated with international security discourse.
Participants in this discourse seem to strive for peaceful and amicable
solutions in the international arms race – and yet the issue at stake has its
roots in the Cold War. A perceptive reader, of course, will sense the
underlying competition over geopolitical, economic and cultural resources,
interests and values, as well as the arduous negotiations over discursive
responsibilities and stakes in power – e.g. “we want to be heard” (line 3),
“Why are the Americans so obstinate about … ” (line 16). Discourses also
echo the psychosocial attitudes of political actors, for example here Putin,
one of the most powerful people on the planet, conveys a self-assured
voice.

Second, a text-sensitive analysis of discourse needs to take into

account the wider dimensions of ideology. Here, for instance, one could
establish that Putin comes from a specific political tradition and responds
to a set of specific (historical) narratives (cf. Baker 2006). Most notable,
however, is the existence of an assertive ‘us vs. them’ dialectics, which
appears both threatening and unforgiving, creating the impression of an
almost unbridgeable clash of interests across seemingly fixed ideological
boundaries. This rhetorical move, ultimately, evokes an underlying
essentialist (and thus relatively inflexible) view of social relations that
assigns stable identities to political actors. This brings to mind Samuel P.
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), which took an essentialist and
antagonistic stance that did great harm to intercultural understanding.

Thirdly, the actors involved in the delivery and dissemination of

Putin’s words, just as those positioned in the wider geopolitical arena, are
fulfilling very specific roles as political agents in a field of discursive and
ideological struggle. They are, to use Bourdieu’s formulation, ‘politically
responsible’ in the sense that they are answerable to a host of diverse
groups and actors in the political field and beyond.

Arguably, a well-informed reader would make out some of the

discursive themes, ideological affiliations and political responsibilities
arising from the interview in Spiegel International. This reader’s
knowledge should include an understanding of the newspaper’s own
political stance, and yet numerous recontextualisation processes remain
invisible to the average reader, processes and strategies that include
8 Political Discourse Analysis in a Multilingual World

translation and that are closely scrutinised by cross-cultural discourse

analysis:

The processes involved from conducting the actual interview to the final
text as published in the mass media are highly complex and involve a
number of transformations. As a result of these transformations, readers of
the respective newspapers get a different impression of the topics discussed
in the interview and of the way in which Putin expressed his views.
Deletions, rearrangements of information, substitutions and paraphrasing
are typical examples of transformations that text producers (i.e. journalists,
revisers, editors) make use of in the recontextualisation processes.
(Schäffner 2008, 3)

Political discourse analysis also needs to incorporate institutional and

genre analysis, just as it must account for intertextual relationships. The
notion of ‘political text’ may cover genres as diverse as “bilateral or
multilateral treaties, speeches made during an electioneering campaign or
at a congress of a political party, a contribution of a member of parliament
to a parliamentary debate, editorials or commentaries in newspapers, a
press conference with a politician, or a politician’s memoirs” (Schäffner
1997e, 119). There are intertextual references across political texts, for
instance one in the interviewer’s question beginning on line 16, which
serves as an allusion to another (unidentified) text about the American
missile programme.

There are, moreover, intertextual links that cut across and beyond
genres. These specific forms of intertextuality tend to be grouped under
the notion of interdiscursivity (Fairclough 1992), which “highlights the
normal heterogeneity of texts in being constituted by combinations of
diverse genres and discourses” (Fairclough 1995, 134). There are multiple
ways in which generic features may visibly overlap across texts, for
instance in the ways oral speech is echoed in the heterogeneous textual
representations of Putin’s interview. Are markers of spoken discourse,
pauses, hesitations, repetitions, etc., faithfully reproduced, or are they
smoothed over, as in the extract from Spiegel International, to provide a
more fluent reading experience?

The significance of intertertextual and interdiscursive relationships for

political discourse analysis cannot be overestimated, but this means little
unless a stretch of text is conceptualised as an instance of (cross-cultural)
recontextualisation. Here, “arguments may be transformed across genres,
and yet remain identifiable as links in the chain of discourse”, a process
 Translating the European House: Discourse, Ideology and Politics 9

that “illustrates the power struggle about specific opinions, beliefs or

ideologies” (Blackledge 2005, 121). Political responsibilities, ideological
leanings and discursive attitudes ‘congeal’ in textual products, and an
analysis of these three dimensions implies attention to (at least some of
the) minutiae of context and to the ways this context has been (cross-
culturally) rearticulated (i.e. recontextualised) within different orders of
discourse (Foucault 1971/1981; see also Fairclough 1992, 1995).

Ultimately, it is “the task of political discourse analysis to relate the

fine grain of linguistic behaviour to what we understand by ‘politics’”
(Chilton and Schäffner 1997/2011, 311), so let us now turn our attention to
the ‘finely grained’ textual, or communicative dimensions of Christina
Schäffner’s approach to political discourse analysis.

Political Discourse as Text:

The Communicative Dimension
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 remains a powerful symbol of the
end of the Cold War era, of the collapse of the communist Eastern bloc
and of German reunification. The collapse of the wall is, of course, open to
various interpretations that are themselves determined by a large variety of
discursive positions (Thrift 1997, Borneman 1998).

As a contemporary witness to momentous historical events, Christina

Schäffner has examined key speeches and documents of the period. Her
discursive analyses of speeches delivered on the eve of German unification
by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and by well-known German writer Günter
Grass, provide valuable insights into the historical determinations of
linguistic choices (Schäffner 1996d, 1997d). Schäffner understands
ideology as belief systems that are shared by social groups; such belief
systems are communicated through discourse and embedded in
institutional practices. Hence, correlations found between institutional
practices and textual profiles can in turn be interpreted and explained
through ideology (Schäffner 2012d, 123).

When dealing with political discourses, analysts must relate the social
and situational contexts of text production and reception to textual features
(Schäffner 2004d). In one study, for instance, Schäffner (2003) provides
insights into intertextual (i.e. knowledge-related) and interdiscursive (i.e.
genre-related) practices across political discourses by relating the
production context of a joint policy document, published by the British
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