Governing by Translation in Canada: The Case of Budget Speeches

Abstract

Koskinen argues that governance is the core function of institutions (2014: 481) and that multilingual institutions employ translation in governing. The need to govern by translation creates a specific translation practice and it is from this perspective that we will analyze the federal government’s budget speeches from 1970 to 1995. The study of the politico-budgetary texts in our corpus will draw on critical discourse analysis, an approach which aims to bring to light power relations often hidden in communication processes (Fairclough, 2015 [1989]). In particular, we will evaluate potential discrepancies between the French and English speeches in the corpus. Are these differences indicative of a power struggle between the two linguistic communities? Ideological markers will be identified in the corpus through the use of semi-au tomated analysis that will pinpoint the occurrences of Canada lemmas in the original English texts and their French translation. This text mining will be done with the aid of bilingual and unilingual concordancers. In our previous work, notably on the translation of televised addresses, the translation of the lemmas Canada involved a power struggle between Quebec nationalist discourse and pan-Canadian nationalist discourse. Our study will demonstrate that this type of power struggle is still to be found in budget speeches, albeit with some differences.