Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has proved influential in widening the remit of translation and interpreting studies by encouraging scholars to understand translation as a sociocultural and political act, to pay close attention to its impact, and to explore how and to what extent it contributes to the construction of powerful discourses in society. CDA lends itself particularly well to the examination of the news genre, and its application to the translation of global news in particular has thus attracted the interest of a number of researchers. A related criticism of CDA concerns the selection of discourse samples for analysis and a perceived lack of objectivity. Corpus-based CDA has also been used to study audiovisual translation, for example by Mouka et al., who investigate what they refer to as “racism”-oriented discourse in films through an analysis of register shifts, using a custom-built annotated corpus.