Shell Nouns In Chinese-English Political Interpreting

Shell noun refers to a type of abstract noun used to convey and represent proposition information,such as fact,problem,and issue."Shell" is a metaphor for the nature of encapsulating and presenting messages of these nouns.The functions of shell nouns include text-cohesion,presupposition,stance construction,etc.Previous studies have largely been restricted to the use of shell nouns in academic discourse and ESL writing,while little research has been carried out on shell nouns in translation or interpretation.This study focuses on Chinese-English consecutive interpreting in the political setting and probes into its use of shell nouns.Specifically,by making comparison between the Chinese source texts and the English interpreted texts,the present study aims to identify frequently added shell nouns,explore their semantic distribution,and discuss the motivation for interpreters to add shell nouns.The research combines qualitative and quantitative research methods.First,a Chinese-English parallel corpus of Chinese Premiers’ press conferences of the Two Sessions from 2009 to 2020 was built,and the English texts were tagged with part-of-speech by TreeTagger.Then the lexico-grammatical patterns of shell nouns were searched via BFSU ParaConc to retrieve the shell-nounhood instances.The Chinese and English parallel concordance lines were checked to see whether the shell nouns were translated from the source texts or added by the interpreters in the interpreting process.The proportion and frequency of added shell nouns were calculated and counted.The semantic distribution of the added shell nouns was also analyzed.In addition,based on the functions of shell nouns,the motivation for interpreters to add shell nouns was explored.It is found that there were 953 tokens of shell nouns used and nearly half of them were added by interpreters in 2009-2020 Premiers’ press conferences.The frequently added shell nouns include effort,respect,process,goal,and measure,etc.With regard to the semantic distribution,mental shell nouns have the highest frequency,which are mainly used to express the government’s attitude towards current events,the Chinese stance and determination to solve problems;circumstantial shell nouns rank the second and factual and eventive shell nouns are used with similar frequency to state objective facts;modal and linguistic shell nouns are rarely used.In addition,the reasons why interpreters add shell nouns can be mainly summarized as follows:1)to deliver coherent and explicit interpretation and facilitate listeners’ understanding;2)to help the audience prepare for the following content by presupposition so as to reach a consensus between the speaker and the listeners;3)to clearly express attitudes as well as construct and convey the government’s stance.Meanwhile,the mediating role of interpreters is also demonstrated in the process.This study expands the research field of shell nouns,opens up new avenues for Chinese-English political interpreting research,and can serve as the reference for interpreters to use shell nouns in Chinese-English interpreting in the political settings.