Cultural Transfer in Political Publicity Interpreting

摘要

Chinese Premier's Press Conference (CPPC), as an epitome of China's publicity interpreting practice, deserves probes into its cultural transfers using descriptive corpus-based methods. Based on an English-Chinese parallel corpus for the 2018 CPPC, such typical cultural forms as idioms, proverbs, colloquial, historical and political terms and their interpretations are compared and analyzed, with the main finding that literal translation is used the most frequently, followed by the clarifying strategy. In other words, core Chinese values have been maximally promoted in publicity translation on the premise that the political information be delivered accurately and completely. In this way, China's cultural confidence can be greatly boosted if the related diction is translated literally, with appropriate explanations. By contrast, it is rare for such expressions to be interpreted using an English equivalent. So the key argument is that in diplomatic interpreting, accuracy has the top priority, followed by the desire to promote China's culture and the need to consider the target audience's comprehension ability. This research is significant as the interpreting strategies and norms generated will benefit both interpreting practitioners and researchers.