Newspaper discourse on translation in China: a study of topics and trends in the People’s Daily (1949–2023)

Newspapers serve as a major platform for both reflecting and shaping public opinion on a wide range of topics, including translation. Yet how translation as a general phenomenon is positioned, discussed, and represented in this medium has received little scholarly attention. This study examines newspaper discourse on translation as a distinctive form of discourse, drawing on a corpus of 1240 texts retrieved from the People’s Daily (1949–2023), the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. As an authoritative publication, the People’s Daily represents institutionalized public discourse, and the findings are interpreted accordingly. To investigate the major topics and general trends in this discourse over a 75-year period, the study integrates word association analysis, co-occurrence network analysis, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis into a unified analytical framework. The study identifies period-specific topics in three periods: e.g. construction of the translation field in Period I (1949–1978), official organization in Period II (1979–2000), and cultural translation in Period III (2001–2023). On the basis of topic distribution, three overarching trends are identified: continuity in literary translation and publishing, a shift from infrastructure building to institutional and professional diversification, and a growing emphasis on cultural diplomacy and ideological outreach. This study contributes to translation studies, discourse studies, and media studies by illuminating the relationships between translation, discourse, and society in the Chinese public sphere, and offers methodological implications for the research into newspaper discourse on translation.