Low-hanging fruits, usual suspects, and pure serendipity: towards a layered methodological framework on translators and interpreters’ ideological language use drawing on the synergy of CDA and corpus linguistics

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 analysis differs from monolingual CDA. Despite its usefulness, traditional CDA was designed for monolingual qualitative analysis and applying it systematically to the corpus analysis of bilingual discourses is less straightforward. So far T&I scholars have explored individual discursive categories (e.g., modality) in a few individual studies. However, there is a lack of overall methodological reflections on the likely ideologically salient categories and how to detect translators and interpreters’ mediation comprehensively. Therefore, a stratified framework is proposed, promising to shed light on the question relating to what CDA researchers might look out for empirically drawing on a corpus approach. The various discursive categories/toolkits covered in this framework potentially serve as a starting point for future studies concerning comparative CDA studies at different levels of abstraction. Rather than being prescriptivist, the proposed layered framework is open-ended, flexible and pragmatic, focusing both on propositional and non-propositional contents and both preconceived a priori experientialist categories and serendipitous discoveries. Illustrative examples from various discursive categories are discussed.