Framing Power, Making Meaning: Rethinking Metaphor Translation in Contemporary Chinese Political Discourse

Abstract

Political metaphor has become one of the quiet engines of official Chinese rhetoric. It does not simply decorate policy language. It helps organise legitimacy, compress history into portable formulas, and project a future oriented moral horizon. Once translated, however, these metaphors enter a different ecology of reading, where the cues that make them persuasive at home may not be available, or may be read through quite different ideological expectations. This paper reviews scholarship on metaphor translation in contemporary Chinese political discourse and argues that a significant strand of this work has tended to frame translation as technical transfer rather than as public negotiation. Bringing functionalist, cognitive and discourse-oriented traditions into dialogue, the review foregrounds reception as the missing hinge between strategy and effect. Across the literature and a small set of emblematic cases drawn from widely circulated official translations, five recurring tensions are traced: semantic density, cultural embeddedness, strategic ambiguity, institutional constraint and reception drift. These tensions show why common strategies such as abstraction, elaboration and standardisation are never neutral fixes. They reshape what the metaphor can do, and for whom it can do it. The research therefore reframes political metaphor translation as a contested event of meaning making, situated at the intersection of language, ideology and global politics.