A Corpus-Based Study of the Lexical Features in Chinese-English Interpreting of the Regular Press Conference of the Ministry of National Defense

Abstract

At present, there are few researches on the regular press conference of the Ministry of National Defense, and most of them focus on some words and sentences, while the whole oral vocabulary is rarely studied. Using the corpus research method and with self-built corpus, this paper takes the Chinese-English interpreting vocabulary of regular press conference of the Ministry of National Defense in the past five years as the research object, and makes a quantitative analysis of four lexical features, namely the standard token/type ratio, high-frequency words, verb nominalization and average word length, and compares them with the same type of US department of defense press conference speech corpus. Then it will analyze the differences between the two and the reasons for the differences and give suggestions. The findings of this study are as follows: Compared with the US press conference, the regular press conference interpreting corpus has higher lexical complexity and lexical density, and the tendency of interpreting and translating is also obvious, which is not consistent with the generality of simplified and standardized translation. The main reason for this phenomenon is that the regular press conference of the government is an important form of public political communication. The spokesman not only needs to convey important policy information but also needs to elaborate the position of the government. Therefore, the words used are more formal and accurate, which also explains that the lexical features of interpretation are more complicated than those of original English to a certain extent.