A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF IDEOLOGICAL ENCODING OF ENGLISH AND MANDARIN TEXTS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
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Devi Alvionita Alindra
Jumino Suhadi
Devi Pratiwy
This study investigates how ideology is linguistically encoded in English and Mandarin texts through a comparative critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework. Drawing upon corpus-assisted methods and grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the research analyzes how each language reflects its underlying epistemological and cultural orientations in discourse. The English corpus—comprising news articles, editorials, and academic texts from Anglophone sources such as The Guardian and BBC is compared with a Mandarin corpus consisting of parallel genres from 人民日报 (People’s Daily), 新华网 (XinhuaNet), and Chinese university materials. Findings reveal that English discourse predominantly encodes ideology through explicit agency, critical reasoning, and dialogic openness, reflecting values of individualism, rationality, and democratic participation. Mandarin discourse, by contrast, constructs ideology through collective framing, agentless constructions, and evaluative affirmation, embodying Confucian principles of harmony, moral order, and social cohesion. Differences in transitivity, modality, and metaphor demonstrate distinct cultural epistemologies English emphasizing critique and change, while Mandarin emphasizes stability and unity. The study contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogue among CDA, SFL, and intercultural pragmatics by extending the analytical scope of CDA beyond Anglophone contexts. It argues that ideological encoding operates not only at the macro-political level but also within micro-linguistic choices that shape meaning and perception across cultures. The findings have pedagogical implications for intercultural communication, translation studies, and discourse pedagogy, underscoring the importance of ideological awareness in global communication
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Devi Alvionita Alindra, Universitas Islam Sumatera Utara, Indonesia
Universitas Islam Sumatera Utara, Indonesia & Universitas Prima Indonesia
