“We must work tirelessly to promote …”: Mediating interpersonal commitment to material processes in English translation of Chinese political discourse

Abstract

Evaluative items have been central in political translation studies. This paper extends previous research by focusing on “circumstances + material processes” expressions through data extracted from Chinese-English parallel corpus of Xi Jinping ’s discourse. Using re-instantiation as its descriptive framework, this research imported into Excel 1686 concordance lines for annotation to reveal how and why certain translation shifts occur. Results show that a clear shift occurs in the translation of the circumstances. Zero forms are employed to reduce interpersonal commitment in translation, while verbs and adjectives are more likely to be used to raise it. The study identifies rhetorical and political motivations for these translation choices. It is hoped that the linguistics-grounded corpus approach provided in this paper could be applied to translation research on other grammatical domains or text types.