Pragmatic strategies in political interpreting: A study of pragmatic markers in interpreted political speeches

Political speeches often involve the employment of adequate pragmatic strategies to help negotiate meaning. In this regard, the use of pragmatic markers (PMs), the non-propositional expressions that perform communicative functions in utterances, serves as an important linguistic indicator of a speaker’s pragmatic strategy (see Fraser, 1996; Romero-Trillo, 2012). Therefore, the appropriate rendition and employment of PMs become crucial for interpreters working with political speeches, in order to correctly reflect the speaker’s pragmatic strategy in a target language.

This paper presents the use of PMs in interpreted political speeches, with a focus on retour interpreting from Chinese to English given the large differences between these two languages and the great difficulty involved in interpreting. The use of PMs was annotated using data from the Corpus of Interpreted Political Speeches from Chinese to English (CIPSCE), a parallel corpus consisting of speeches delivered by key political figures in Beijing and Hong Kong and their interpretations in English, about two million word tokens in size. The study compared the use of PMs between the Chinese source texts and the English target texts. The renditions of PMs from different source languages (Cantonese vs. Putonghua) and in different speech modalities (monologue vs. dialogue) and interpreting modes (simultaneous interpreting vs. consecutive interpreting) were also examined. Findings of the study show the strategies applied by interpreters when they interpret PMs in political settings. They also indicate the possible influence of pragmatic strategies in Chinese (source language) political speeches in retour political interpreting from Chinese to English.