Conference interpreting in diplomatic settings: An integrated corpus and critical discourse analysis

This chapter integrates critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL) to investigate how Chinese political discourse is reconstructed in diplomatic settings. Through a literature review of relevant methodological approaches, the need and rationale to combine CDA and CL are highlighted and the integrated approach is proposed for translation and interpreting studies. Based on a self-built corpus of Chinese–English conference interpreting from a range of diplomatic settings (2006–2013), the analysis yields two findings: 1) the ideational information has close renditions in interpreting (i.e. few changes from the source speech), whereas the interpersonal information is susceptible to interpreting shifts; 2) conference interpreters tend to reconstruct political discourse with a stronger sense of solidarity and obligation through their mediation of renditions in diplomatic settings.