James Chonglong GuThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies
James Chonglong Gu
PhD Interpreting Studies
About
57
Publications
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Introduction
Taking an interdisciplinary, contextualised, socially engaged and multilingual perspectives to language and communication, Dr Chonglong Gu's work concerns translation and interpreting, discourse analysis (critical, positive and multimodal), corpus linguistics, media, multilingualism, linguistic landscape, world Englishes, linguistic anthropology, Chinese studies, exploring issues of ideology, power, discourse, identity, globalisation, migration and language use in authentic real-world contexts.
Education
September 2015 - December 2018
September 2011 - September 2012
Publications
Publications (57)
Previously under the colonial influence of the British empire and now a global business hub in the middle east, Dubai in the UAE represents a salient case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity with immigrants and temporary workers outnumbering the local Arabic-speaking Emiratis. Framed within a globalised, post-colonial and neoliberal context...
With deepening globalisation and increased people-to-people contact, English is becoming more relevant in Thailand, which boasts a sizable expat community and tourists from around the world. While various scholars have explored the more overt, explicit, and obvious aspect of English glocalised in the Thai context (e.g. expressions such as ‘same sam...
Formulaic expressions/prefabricated chunks are established as crucial in fluent speech production in psycholinguistics and language acquisition/learning yet have been largely underexplored in interpreting studies, barring a few experimental studies. Formulaic expressions are particularly underexplored from a discursive perspective in interpreting,...
Never formally colonised by Western powers, Thailand is a rapidly developing nation in Southeast Asia. To outsiders, the assumption might be that Thailand is a homogenous Thai-speaking Buddhist country. However, such over-simplistic views ignore diversity and the existence of de facto multilingualism and multiculturalism on the ground. This linguis...
Due to its strategic location and previous colonial history and as a result of globalisation, Malaysia has been a diverse multilingual and multicultural nation, where such languages as Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil are spoken. While LL has been widely explored in a European and North American context, LL is relatively less investigated in the G...
Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. T...
English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). Howev...
Partly as a result of China’s reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of ‘low-end globalisation’, Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South As...
An urban space’s linguistic landscape represents a multimodal and multilingual discourse, indexing the historical, socio-political, cultural, and ethnolinguistic aspects of the locale. Contributing to sociolinguistic research in our global cities, this study zooms in on an unexpected Chinese ethnic enclave, or Chinatown, in Dubai, a superdiverse ur...
In interpreting studies, there has traditionally been an over-emphasis on the ST, where the interpreting product (TT) is often considered as secondary and even insignificant. This is evidenced saliently, for instance, in studies focusing on interpreting quality and accuracy. Gradually, there has been an attitudinal shift, where interpreters are dee...
While there have been recent calls for an “outward turn” in (written) translation studies, interpreting researchers have mostly taken an inward-looking view of interpreting and investigated it as a semi-closed system and an arguably self-interested practice from within, despite the fact that interpreting in various forms and settings has been a co-...
English, for historical, economic and socio-political reasons, is the world’s single most dominant language. Formerly the language of colonialism, English has established itself as the unchallenged lingua franca (Crystal 1997; Kachru 1992) in politics, diplomacy, business and education. The dominance of English has generated widespread scholarly in...
The year 1993 represents a momentous milestone in the not-so-long history of translation and interpreting studies (TIS). The foundational paper published by Mona Baker entitled ‘Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications’ in 1993 has signalled a defining moment in the application of digital humanities (DH) approaches...
The Covid-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place’s anti-Covid battle. In the study, a locale’s Covid-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime multilingual/me...
Living under the far-reaching ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, effective communication has been the order of the day in recent years. The very nature of the pandemic strikes home the crucial need to communicate multilingually in our increasingly (super)diverse world, in which translation has a big part to play. Constituting a socially shaped...
As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e...
Contributing to a much-needed ‘outward turn’ in interpreting studies, this intervention examines the role of interpreting and interpreters in (re)articulating the welcome ‘voice’ of a developing nation in the global South. Against the backdrop of reform and opening-up (ROU), China, the world’s largest developing country, is increasingly open and ke...
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a dramatic upsurge in medical and scientific research. However, despite the importance of language in communicating medical and scientific knowledge to people from different sociocultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds, the role of translation and multilingual communication remains significantly undere...
Thanks to the pragmatist Reform and Opening-up (RoU) program initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China, the largest developing country, has witnessed decades of sustained development and is poised to overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world. RoU is a major watershed in China’s recent history, signaling the beginning of China’s...
Following the trends of digital humanities and interdisciplinarity, there is growing interest in exploring the discursive aspects of translation and interpreting (T&I), drawing on the triangulation between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics. The comparative nature of this line of research means that bilingual discourse analysi...
Digital humanities (DH) is increasingly the ‘cool’ kid in town. Gradually going from niche to mainstream, DH without doubt is a hot buzzword in recent years, representing one of the most rapidly developing areas in humanities-related studies. So far, a wide range of projects, scholarly research, and publications have been dedicated to this emerging...
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) represents a prominent and relatively comprehensive functional approach to language as communication. As a well-established area in linguistics, SFL aims to provide in-depth and elaborate discussions on different grammatical categories and their corresponding functions in language. So far, it has focused on det...
If the important role of written translation in the construction and contestation of knowledge and narratives remains largely under-explored, then the part played by interpreting and interpreters is even less examined in knowledge construction and story-telling. At a time when Beijing increasingly seeks to bolster its discursive power and have the...
Looking beyond a micro lexicogrammatical perspective, this article takes a broader discursive and sociopolitical view of meaning potential, arguing that interpreting in various political and institutional contexts creates new meaning potentials, with interpreters serving as agents and intercultural connecting points between discourses. This often e...
Over the past century, the hundred-chaptered Chinese classic Xiyou ji (Journey to the West) has been abridged into English many a time, with the three most influential versions translated by Timothy Richard (Wu, 1913), Arthur Waley (Wu, 1942), and Anthony Yu (Wu, 2006), respectively. On the basis of paratextual analysis and the narrative theory, th...
Contributing to China’s regime of truth (Foucault in The Foucault reader: An introduction to Foucault’s thought. Penguin, London, pp. 51–75, 1984), the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press Conferences are an annual discursive event held in the Chinese capital Beijing during China’s annual two sessions, that is, the National Pe...
The premier's annual press conferences are an interpreter-mediated and institutionalised event, which enables the Chinese government to articulate its official discourse on a variety of topics in front of a domestic and international audience. Framing the conferences as part of an autopoietic system, following Luhmann, helps to shed light on the im...
Unlike the use of force or coercion, the articulation of ideological discourse constitutes a softer approach in the legitimation and hegemonic rule of dominant political actors, achieved through manufacturing consent ( Gramsci 1971 ). As a major site of ideology, the televised premier’s press conferences in China represent such a discursive event,...
The interpreter-mediated Premier-Meets-the-Press Conferences are an institutional(ized) discursive event in China, permitting the Chinese premier to answer a range of potentially challenging and face-threatening questions from journalists. Arguably, this dynamic and interactive setting can be profitably conceptualized using Bakhtin’s notion of dial...
The pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional(ised) event in China. At this discursive event,...
The sociopolitical and cultural evolution as a result of the Reform and Opening up in 1978, facilitated not least by the inexorable juggernaut of globalization and technological advancement, has revolutionized the way China engages domestically and interacts with the outside world. The need for more proactive diplomacy and open engagement witnessed...
The interpreter-mediated premier’s press conferences have been an established annual practice in mainland China held in the wake of the reform and opening-up in 1978. A typical site of ideology, this discursive event enables the Chinese premier to openly articulate China’s official policies and positions and, in doing so, construct a certain desire...
A Pronged Approach to Identifying Ideologically Salient Shifts in Interpreter’s Discursive (Re)construction of China’s Political Discourse: A Methodological Exploration
The identification of ideologically salient shifts using CDA is often key in investigating interpreter’s agency in discursively (re)constructing the original political discourse. A...