A Study On Graduation Resources Shifts In Chinese Premier’s Press Conference Interpreting

This study aims to investigate the shifts of graduation resources in original Chinese and interpreted English against the background of corpus-based research of Chinese-English conference interpreting within the framework of graduation system which is a sub-system of appraisal theory proposed by James R.Martin.The material for the study is the self-compiled bilingual parallel corpus derived from Chinese Premier’s press conferences(2016-2021).The corpus is made up of 100,232 characters and words,which are extracted from the Chinese transcripts and their English translations.This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods as a basis to account for shifts in graduation resources and offers more insights into the graduation resources study on political discourse interpreting.The quantitative corpus-linguistic method was used to identify the shifts of graduation resources between the original Chinese transcripts and their English translations,while the qualitative method was used to analyze instances of different graduation resources automatically extracted from the corpus.The analysis aimed to find out the characteristics and motivations of graduation resources shifts.The results confirm that there are shifts in graduation resources in translated and non-translated Chinese.There are three interesting findings.First,the shifts in graduation resources are mainly shown in up-scaling and down-scaling in force and sharpening in focus.Second,the interpreter tends to increase the degree of intensity or amount with lexico-grammatical adverbs to serve speeches on determination and commitment,persuasion,emphasis,and diplomacy;lower the degree of intensity or amount for downplaying severity and moderating questions and;sharpen in focus to emphasize effects of political decisions.Third,the motivations mainly come from two aspects,namely,interpersonal meaning and political discourse.