Pan, F and Wang, B orcid.org/0000-0003-2404-5214 (2021) Is interpreting of China’s political discourse becoming more target-oriented? – A corpus-based diachronic comparison between the 1990s and the 2010s. Babel: international journal of translation, 67 (2). ISSN 0521-9744
Abstract
Interpreting is an activity embedded in a particular socio-cultural context that underpins norms of interpreting. Adopting the descriptive translation studies approach, this study aims to find out whether the interpretation for the Chinese government by institutional interpreters is becoming more target-oriented in the decade of the 2010s in comparison with the 1990s. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the Corpus of Interpreted Chinese Government Press Conferences in the 1990s and that of the 2010s, the study reveals that there is a significant increase in the total number of target-oriented shifts in the 2010s, manifested predominantly in “inserting hedges before propositional statements” and “modality shifts to attenuate ST’s categorical force.” Only minimal differences are found for the number of shifts in “explicitation of emphatic meanings,” “specification of Chinese source deictic lexis,” and “explicitation of implicit logic relations” between the two periods. The results thus indicate a general trend of becoming more target-oriented in interpreting, particularly a tendency to mitigate ST’s illocutionary force to a greater extent in the 2010s. Such changes in China’s institutional interpreting are correlated with the evolving socio-political context and the norms of institutional interpreting.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021, Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Babel: International Journal of Translation. Please contact the publisher (John Benjamins) for permission to re-use or reprint this material in any form. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | analyse de corpus et comparaison diachronique; changement d’orientation vers le public cible; China’s political discourse; corpus-based diachronic comparison; discours politique de la Chine; institutional interpreting; interprétation institutionnelle; target-oriented shifts |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Translation Studies (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 17 Feb 2021 15:43 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Identification Number: | 10.1075/babel.00215.pan |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:171133 |