In Chapter 10, we revisit the problem that certain politically relevant, culturally embedded notions are very difficult to translate. A key issue that such a difficulty of translating causes is the following. Often, when we talk about a politically relevant issue in two linguacultures by using English as an academic lingua franca, we may be comparing apples with pears. Such a comparison leads to the previously mentioned problem of ethnocentrism, and so it is important to consider how to resolve it by merging politics and translation studies. As a case study, we examine the problematics of translating the sociopolitically relevant Chinese expression wenming (‘civilised’) into English. Following the translation framework of House, we argue that untranslatability can be overcome by House’s notion of ‘cultural filtering’.

In Chapter 5 we present the pitfall of using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. As a case study, we present historical diplomatic correspondence between representatives of China and the US in the time of colonialism. We argue that it is not productive to attempt to demonstrate how evil colonialism was, which is a frequent research goal in spite of the fact that the evil nature of colonialism is an accepted truth. Rather, we believe that it is more productive to look at exactly how the coloniser used language in order to coerce representatives of the colonised country to fulfil their demands.

In Chapter 9, we look at how the pragmatician can capture the interactional dynamics of seemingly confusing cases of aggression in mediated political settings. In mediated scenes of politics, conflict may evolve in a seemingly ad hoc way, and in order to be able to analyse such settings it is necessary to linguistically analyse exactly what is happening in them. As a case study, we present a corpus of heckling incidents, including cases such as when the previous US first lady Michelle Obama was heckled in public. We argue that while heckling appears as a ‘disorderly’ incident, manifestations of heckling can be systematically categorised into major types, which impose different ritual frames on the public speaker being heckled. Following this view, our analysis shows that heckling is a standard situation in which the participants actually follow conventional forms of behaviour.