The Reconstruction Of Modality In Chinese-english Government Press Conference Interpreting

Government Press Conferences(hereafter shortened as GPC)during the annual “Two Sessions” of National People's Congress(NPC)and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference(CPPCC)every year serve as an important window for the world to access first-hand information about the Chinese government's policies and stances towards domestic and diplomatic issues,among which the most influential ones are those featuring the premiers and foreign ministers of China.To facilitate communication between the Chinese officials and the overseas media and effectively publicize China's policies to the world,interpreters from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are assigned to offer consecutive interpreting(primarily from Chinese to English)at these press conferences,which constitutes the research object of the present thesis.Modality as a semantic-grammatical category construes important interpersonal meanings such as the speaker's attitude or stance in communication,so it is no surprise that modality markers are used frequently at the GPCs.It is found that the rendition of modality from Chinese to English involves a considerable number of choices on the interpreter and many of the choices involve translation shifts in the semantics of modality,so it'll be interesting to explore the regular patterns in the interpreters' choices in reconstructing modality and the motivating factors behind.Drawing largely on the descriptive and comparative model for translation shifts from Toury(1995),the semantic system of modality from Halliday & Matthiessen(2014),and the integrated model of sociocultural context analysis from interpreting scholars(Diriker 2004,Alexieva 1997,and P?chhacker 2009),this thesis attempts to conduct a corpus-based study of modality shifts in GPC interpreting with the focus on the overarching question: How are modal meanings reconstructed in Chinese-English GPC interpreting and what is the relationship between these interpreting choices and the sociocultural context?The Chinese-English interpreting corpus used in the study consists of 21 parallel texts drawn from 21 press conferences featuring the premiers or foreign ministers of China during the “Two Sessions” from 1989 to 2014,with the total size of 293,284 tokens.As these press conferences are the most influential in China and the in-house interpreters represent the top-level of professional competence in China,the corpus is considered representative of diplomatic-political interpreting in China.To address the research question,this project attempts qualitative analysis of the socio-cultural context of interpreting and qualitative analysis of the interpersonal effects of modality shifts as well as quantitative analysis of modality shifts based on the corpus data.First,with the help of Wordsmith 6.0,15 English modality markers and 15 Chinese modality markers are identified as high-frequency modality markers to be analyzed in the parallel corpus.A coding scheme of modality shifts is then carefully designed with the focus on semantic shifts in terms of modality type,modality value and orientation.After that,modality shifts are coded and regular patterns are explored from two directions,the use of English modality markers and the translation of Chinese modality markers,followed by the analysis of the interpersonal effects of the major types of modality shifts.Finally,the relationship between modality reconstruction in GPC interpreting and its sociocultural context is explored with the focus on two contextual factors: the institutional norms revealed from the meta-discourse on diplomatic-political interpreting in China,and the typological features of GPC interpreting in China.Corpus-based quantitative analysis of modality shifts reveals the following patterns: 1)Generally speaking,modality shifts are outnumbered by zero-shifts,but the degree of modality shifts(around 40%)is still fairly high considering availability of equivalent Chinese/English modality markers.2)Among the three dimensions,shifts of modality value are the most common,shifts of orientation fairly common and shifts of modality type the least common.3)“De-obligation” is predominant in terms of shifts of modality type.4)Different from the predominance of “subjectivisation” and “weakening” shifts in the use of English modality markers,“objectivisation” and “strengthening” shifts are predominant in the translation of Chinese modality markers,but “subjectivisation” and “weakening” shifts(mainly caused by the addition of English modality markers)take the upper hand in the overall reconstruction of modality.5)The “addition” of English modality markers is preferred to the “omission” of Chinese modality markers in terms of macro-shifts.6)The identity of ST speaker doesn't affect the general degree or predominant types of modality shifts but does affect the degree of the “strengthening” shift.Qualitative case studies reveal the interpersonal effects of the major types of modality shifts: 1)The “de-obligation” shifts either render the Chinese officials' speeches more sincere and responsive to the audience,or make the journalists' questions more respectful to the speaker and appealing to the audience.2)The shifts of “subjectivisation” and “weakening” foreground the Chinese government's subjectivity and make the Chinese officials or the journalists sound more friendly and polite.3)The “strengthening” and “objectivisation” shifts either make the Chinese government speakers sound more confident and authoritative or make the journalists sound more straightforward and concise.The case studies indicate that the interpreters frequently allow modality shifts instead of always using “stock equivalents” in their reconstruction of modality mainly for achieving a better communicative effect.The juxtaposition of the regular patterns of modality shifts and the meta-discourse and typological features of GPC interpreting reveals the close relationship between the interpreters‘ choices concerning modality and the socio-cultural context of interpreting: the institutional norm of “fidelity first and acceptability second” for Chinese diplomatic interpreting extracted from the meta-discourse proves to have strong but not absolute governing power for GPC interpreters,and the actual interpreting choices in the reconstruction of modality are clearly motivated by the distinct typological features of GPC interpreting,which include its participants and their goals of communication,its temporal and spatial setting,topics,text type,working mode,and directionality.The study indicates the nature of GPC interpreting as a socially-situated and interpreter-mediated communicative activity.On the one hand,the interpreters' choices in reconstructing modality are constrained by the institutional norms and motivated by the typological features of GPC interpreting;on the other hand,the interpreters as subjective agents play an active role in mediating the communication between Chinese government officials and foreign journalists.The major contributions of this study include the illustration of CIS as an “offshoot”(Shlesinger 1998: 1)of CTS and a promising empirical approach of IS,the tentative development of a descriptive-explanatory model for socially-oriented interpreting studies,the discussion of the nature of interpreting as a socially situated practice and the active role of the interpreters in mediating the communication between the ST speakers and TT listeners,the exploration of ST-TT relations in GPC interpreting by examining the degree and pattern of modality shifts at the semantic level,as well as practical implications in terms of the treatment of modality in Chinese-English interpreting.