Translating the True North: Exploring Representations of Canada Around the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits

Abstract

A country’s international reputation has profound implications for its citizens; given that national image or reputation is built and circulated using language on a global scale, translation is necessarily involved. This project draws on bilingual corpora of government and media texts to examine how Canada was framed in the discourses and narratives in circulation in its two official languages at the time of the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits, using concepts and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, narrative theory, and corpus linguistics. Examining some aspects of language in use such as collocation, semantic relations, and metaphor, several of the ways in which Canada was framed in the two contexts and languages were compared. The project concludes that discourses and narratives may differ between sources and languages, thereby highlighting the importance of recognizing the impact of translation on the variety of national representations within discourses and narratives.