Hedges in Chinese-English Conference Interpreting: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Interpreters’ Role Deviation

This book explored interpreters’ role when interpreting for Chinese government press conference and discovered the role deviation of conference interpreters in Chinese-English conference interpreting, by taking corpus-based approach to analyze hedges in interpreting discourse. So far, the discovery of role deviation for conference interpreters in this book is relevantly fresh in conceptual, empirical, and methodological aspects, against the background that conference interpreters are traditionally assumed to be invisible and passive ＂non-person.＂ Arguably, this book revisited and renewed the concept of interpreters’ role, offered a role theory-based theoretical framework in some potential issues in future studies, designed a novel empirical route by using hedges as the intervening points to gain insight into interpreters’ role, and applied Python-a new natural language processing programming in data extraction. Thus, this book is believed to contribute some new conceptual, theoretical as well as methodological significance to the future studies on interpreters’ role and performance.

This book is intended to act as a useful reference for scholars, practitioners, interpreters, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and anyone who shows interest in interpreters’ role and performance, corpus-based interpreting product.

Juan HU, Ph.D. in interpreting studies, is currently an associate professor and dean in the English Department of School of Foreign Languages of Guizhou Normal University. She is also a member of Translators Association of China. She conducted her Ph.D. research at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at Xiamen University with world-renowned reputation in interpreting studies, focusing on the interpreters’ role. Her research interests include interpreters’ role, corpus-based interpreting discourse analysis, and gender differences in interpreting product. Her recent publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as: Chinese Translators Journal, Babel, Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Beijing International Studies University, Translation Horizon, and Minority Translators Journal. She has been an active interpreter in some international conferences and a researcher in community interpreting in China.