A corpus-driven multi-dimensional analysis of interpreted discourses in political settings

The study explores typical linguistic features of interpreted discourses in political settings. Previous studies have focused on norms in interpreting, interpreting strategies, and translation universals, but there is a lack of investigation about linguistic features that are typical of interpreted discourses and that can make interpreted discourses distinct from non-interpreted discourses. In order to identify typical features of interpreted political discourses, the study employed the corpus-driven multi-dimensional approach proposed by Douglas Biber (1988) in analysing a comparable interpreting corpus of about 400,000 English words. The corpus was POS-tagged by Treetagger and annotated with 67 linguistic features. Three factors and dimensions were found to be of much help to differentiate oral from literate political discourses, interpreted from non-interpreted political discourses, and planned from unplanned political discourses. In comparison with Biber’s study, the genres and text types that the four types of political discourses are closest to were identified. It was found that the interpreted political discourses are more likely to be categorised into the genre of professional letters rather than oral speeches.