A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Interpreting Styles in the Press Conferences of China’s “Two Sessions”

Abstract

On an annual basis, China’s “Two Sessions” draw researchers’ attention to the study of interpreting that comes along. However, the related research mostly focuses on interpreting strategies and skills, and rarely involves the interpreter who produces the interpreting. This paper collects both of two interpreters’ texts at the press conferences of the “Two Sessions” from 2010 to 2020 to build a parallel corpus. By comparing their interpreting, with the speeches of the leaders of the White House as a comparable corpus, the study seeks to probe into the similarities and differences between the interpreting styles of two interpreters from the linguistic perspective. It is found that when interpreting, the interpreter Sun has richer vocabulary and a higher lexical density than the interpreter Zhang. The interpreting style of Sun is closer to the written style, while Zhang’s style is more colloquial. Compared with the transcripts of the U.S. press conference, the linguistic features of Zhang’s interpreting is more similar to those in the comparable corpus in vocabulary richness, word length and readability. Therefore, Zhang’s interpreting might be more likely to be intelligible and acceptable to English speakers.