The State of Translation in China: Appraisal of the French Version of President Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China

Abstract

As part of China’s propaganda machine, the doctrinal book The Governance of China (2014b), which compiles speeches from President Xi Jinping, has special significance in that it has been specifically formulated to be translated and supplied to the foreign mass readership. In this article, we will apply tools from discourse analysis and rhetoric (logos, ethos, pathos) onto three texts from this corpus about the Middle Kingdom’s defence policy in order to assess in what way the effective translation strategies pertain to the unquestionably displayed proselytisation function. Across this comparative analysis of the Chinese original and its French version, we will see notably how Xi Jinping’s figure is distorted through the translators’ language choices to appear more attractive to French-speaking readers.