A Corpus-based Diachronic Study On Anomalous Collocations In The Government Work Report

In China’s endeavor to build an international discourse system,the political discourse,which gives expression to the policies and philosophy of the Chinese government and the Party,stands at the core.Therefore,the Government Work Report of the State Council(GWR),one of the most important political documents conventionally translated by experts from the central authorities,has always been the focus among Chinese scholars.However,few researchers so far have shown interests in the diachronic changes of the Reports,with most of their attention focused in a single text or all of the texts indiscriminately as a whole.Apparently,translation never happens in the air.Since the change of time can greatly contribute to the output of translation,diachronic study can be an indispensable part in building China’s international political discourse system.For this reason,the present research collected the GWR texts in previous years,studied the anomalous collocations in the TT,and paid special attention to their diachronic changes.Specifically,we collected the 18 GWR texts from 2001 to 2018,and built three sub-corpus:the GWR-ST Corpus,the GWR-TT Corpus,and the GWR-Parallel Corpus.Meanwhile,the British National Corpus(BNC)was selected as the reference corpus.Next,we theoretically defined the term anomalous collocation,on the ground of which we collected the 21 most typical anomalous collocations with the help of corpus features,including Key Words,Collocations and Regex.Finally,by analyzing the language features and frequency of those collocations in different stages,we came to the conclusion that anomalous collocation’s usage was significantly reduced since the new administration came to office in 2013.While retaining the characteristics of some of the China-specific concepts and rhetoric,translators adopted a more reader-centered approach in dealing with the collocations,in an attempt to make them more natural,fluent and reader-friendly.