A Corpus-based Study Of Operational Norms In Interpreting Chinese Leaders’ Speeches At UN

In diplomatic contexts,the statements of leaders reflect the policies of the country that are closely related to national interests,functioning as a crucial role in safeguarding national interests and building the international relationship.Therefore,interpreters who take the responsibilities to help spread China’s ideas are expected to accurately and completely convey the discourse meaning of leaders’ speeches.The special diplomatic setting and the simultaneous mode of interpreting differentiate interpreting at UN from other forms of diplomatic interpreting,which is characterized by the unity of precision and fuzziness and distinctive conversion between inwardness and outwardness.Interpreters who are subject to the strong constraints of norms that cannot be observed directly but reflected in interpreters’decision-making process and interpreting behaviors have to adopt adequate interpreting strategies in order to realize the speaker’s intention.As a result,the study of norms in UN interpreting is essential for spreading Chinese ideas in international stages.The present study examines the frequency of lexical items with distinctive diplomatic features for quantitative analysis and analyzes the interpreting strategies that are influenced by interpreting norms in combination with linguistic differences and the socio-cultural background.By analyzing interpreting phenomenon in the UN setting,this study tries to summarize a theoretical framework of operational norms in interpreting and explore how interpreters effectively build China’s image of a major power.The research questions are:1)What interpreting strategies do interpreters adopt when interpreting lexical items in UN speeches such as conjunctions,personal pronouns,and Chinese attitude verbs?2)What operational norms in interpreting influence interpreters’ language choice for building China’ s image in an international diplomatic setting?The research results show that interpreters adopt such interpreting strategies as direct correspondence,specification and omission when they are dealing with special linguistic phenomena in the UN setting like conjunctions,personal pronouns and Chinese attitude verbs.This study has put forward two pairs of operational norms in interpreting that influence the use of interpreting strategies-explicit and implicit norms as well as weakened and intensified norms-and revised the classification of the existing operational norms by adding "invariant norm" to the theoretical framework.This study has enriched the research on operational norms in interpreting with the assistance of corpus approach and explored how can interpreters help build China’s image in the world stage as a great power.