Chinese Diplomatic Interpreters’ Style:A Multi-Dimensional Study Based On Comparable Inter-Modal Corpus

Style is a traditional topic in translation studies.Discussion concerning translators’/interpreters’ style,e.g."voice","fingerprint" and "mark" indicate translators/interpreters possess subjectivity while translating/interpreting.The study on interpreters’ style remains under-studied compared with that on translators’ style:related concepts have not been sufficiently defined;most studies on interpreters’ style focus on simultaneous interpreting,leaving consecutive interpreting largely underexplored;previous analyses of interpreters’ style concentrate on discrepancies of language more than similarities;further identification of analytical parameters for the evaluation of interpreters’ style remains possible.The present study concentrates on interpreters’ style via Chinese-English consecutive interpreting in the Chinese diplomatic interpreting context,attempting to answer the following two research questions.First,from a diachronic perspective,what are the similarities and differences between the styles of diplomatic interpreters,diplomatic translators,and native speakers in both diplomatic and daily life contexts.The question can be further dissected into three sub-questions:1)What are the similarities and differences in the language choice between diplomatic interpreting and diplomatic translation?2)What are the similarities and differences in the language choice between diplomatic interpreters and native speakers under diplomatic context?3)What are the similarities and differences in the language choice between diplomatic interpreters and native speakers in daily life context?Second,from a synchronic perspective,what changes has diplomatic interpreters’ style undergone from 1998 to 2020?This question can also be dissected into three sub-questions:1)Whether interpreters’ style varies across spokesmen?2)Whether interpreters’ style varies across interpreters?3)Whether interpreters’ style varies across gender?4)Whether interpreters’style varies in terms of paralinguistic features?To answer the above-mentioned questions,this study combines the linguistic cooccurrence theory,methods of quantitative linguistics and descriptive translation studies,and adopts multi-dimensional analysis as the analytical framework.This study also builds an inter-modal and multi-modal diplomatic interpreting and translation corpus,which consists of 4 sub-corpuses,i.e.Chinese-English Diplomatic Interpreting Corpus(CEDIC)containing Chinese source text and Chinese-English interpreting of Premier Meets the Press during Two Sessions from 1998 to 2020,Chinese-English Diplomatic Translation Corpus(CEDTC)containing Chinese source text and ChineseEnglish translation of Government Work Report from 2000 to 2020,Diplomatic Spoken Language Corpus(DISLC)containing spoken language data of White House Press Conference from 1998 to 2020,and Daily Spoken Language Corpus selected from visà-vis spoken language corpus as part of the American National Corpus(ANC).Total capacity of this corpus stands at 1,138,673 words.This study has two major findings.1)From the diachronic perspective,the diplomatic interpreters’ style resembles the style of native speakers under diplomatic context,displaying the most similar language choice across 6 dimensions among 4 subcorpuses.2)From the synchronic perspective,regardless of changes with speakers,interpreters and gender,diplomatic interpreters’ style consistently leans toward informational production,non-narrative,explicit reference,overt expression of persuasion,abstract information and on-line informational elaboration across the 6 dimensions,despite slight differences in the degree of style trend.Besides,in terms of paralinguistic features,average speech rate of Chinese diplomatic interpreters is faster that original speakers;average pitch of these interpreters is mainly influenced by gender;and diplomatic interpreters’ average intensity exhibits no significant differences but fluctuates more often.This study is potentially innovative in four aspects.First,it looks into an underexplored topic,endeavoring a new attempt in corpus-based translational studies by systematically describing diplomatic interpreters’ style from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives,and examining language choice similarities across difference language users.Second,it proposes a new methodology by applying multi-dimensional analysis with all 6 dimensions to the study of interpreters’ style.Third,it constructs a multi-modal corpus that includes interpreting language,translation language and spoken language of native speakers,dividing native speakers’ spoken language into the ones in diplomatic context and in daily life context for more accurate and scientific results.Fourth,it achieves new findings e.g.linguistic co-occurrence in different occasions can be considerably dissimilar even for native speakers.Studies that compare translators/interpreters with native speakers should take different social settings into consideration.In spite of limitations in cause explanation of interpreters’ style,the current study produces new insights for the theoretical construction of the study on interpreters’ style as well as interpreting teaching and training.Building on this study,future ones may continue to enrich corpus-based interpreting studies and diplomatic interpreting studies by enlarging corpus as well as increasing various analytic angles on interpreters’ style.