Register Shifts in Political Conference Interpreting: A Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

Register has been identified as one of the most important factors conditioning utterance perception and comprehension. The extant research in corpus-based interpreting studies has reported a shift towards oral and formal registers in the interpreted language, but few studies have considered the role of source speech interference and the equalising effect concerning oral-type source based on the systematic variation of linguistic features. This chapter applies a cross-lingual multidimensional approach to political conference interpreting parallel and comparable corpora based on a contrastive register analysis between Chinese and English. Quantitative analyses at the feature, dimension, function, and register levels reveal interpreters to have shifted literate source speech to a more oral, attitudinal, and less formal register, and oral source speech to a less oral, more formal, and attitudinal register. The effects of interpreting, source speech, and target register expectations were teased out. The most important finding is that regardless of source speech registers, interpreting products tend to show more similar registers to each other than to source speech.