On the F word:a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 1990-2009

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts. © The Author(s) 2012.

The discourse of climate change: a corpus-based approach

Based on Goffman’s definition that frames are general ‘schemata of interpretation’ that people use to ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’, other scholars have used the concept in a more specific way to analyze media coverage. Frames are used in the sense of organizing devices that allow journalists to select and emphasise topics, to decide ‘what matters’ (Gitlin 1980). Gamson and Modigliani (1989) consider frames as being embedded within ‘media packages’ that can be seen as ‘giving meaning’ to an issue. According to Entman (1993), framing comprises a combination of different activities such as: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Previous research has analysed climate change with the purpose of testing Downs’s model of the issue attention cycle (Trumbo 1996), to uncover media biases in the US press (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), to highlight differences between nations (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann 2007) or to analyze cultural reconstructions of scientific knowledge (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). In this paper we shall present data from a corpus linguistics-based approach. We will be drawing on results of a pilot study conducted in Spring 2008 based on the Nexis news media archive. Based on comparative data from the US, the UK, France and Germany, we aim to show how the climate change issue has been framed differently in these countries and how this framing indicates differences in national climate change policies.

Unknown agents in translated political discourse

This article investigates the role of translation and interpreting in political discourse. It illustrates discursive events in the domain of politics and the resulting discourse types, such as jointly produced texts, press conferences and speeches. It shows that methods of Critical Discourse Analysis can be used effectively to reveal translation and interpreting strategies as well as transformations that occur in recontextualisation processes across languages, cultures, and discourse domains, in particular recontextualisation in mass media. It argues that the complexity of translational activities in the field of politics has not yet seen sufficient attention within Translation Studies. The article concludes by outlining a research programme for investigating political discourse in translation. ©2012 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Speaker positioning in interpreter-mediated press conferences

This article investigates potential effects which (the recontextualisation of) interpreted discourse can have on the positioning of participants. The discursive event which forms the basis of the analysis are international press conferences which bring politicians and journalists together. The dominant question addressed is: (How) do interpreter-mediated encounters influence the positioning of participants and thus the construction of interactional and social roles? The article illustrates that methods of (critical) discourse analysis can be used to identify positioning strategies which are employed by participants in such triadic exchanges. The data come from press conferences which involve English, German, and French as source and target languages.