Examining The Handling Of Register During Diplomatic Interpreting

This paper adopts Sun Haiqin and Zhang Ailing’s framework of the five parameters of register in interpreting language to examine the handling of register during diplomatic interpreting at the premier’s press conferences for the NPC in the past 23 years.Those five parameters are lexical properties,grammatical and syntactic equivalence,tenor consistency,formal correspondence,and verbal or phonological choices.The research results will be presented in the form of a case study.And the past23 years will be divided into five periods;the years which mark the beginning of a new term of presidential leadership will be singled out for detailed analysis.To put it simply,the years 1998,2003,2008,2013,and 2018,which respectively marked the first year of each presidential term that lasted for five years,are selected as representatives of their period.The interpreters’ performance at the press conferences for the NPC in those years will be examined with close scrutiny from the five perspectives mentioned above.After detailed examination,the paper discovers that China’s top interpreters’ handling of register in the past 23 years has seen progress in most of the parameters,with the progress in syntactic functional equivalence being the most revolutionary.And for those aspects that do not see marked progress along the years,such as verbal or phonological choices,that is because the interpreters’ performance was good enough in the first place.