Modern Social Science Research

We compiled a parable corpus consisting of English translations of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespersons’ remarks and original English-language transcripts from U.S. Department of State press briefings. By comparing the English translations with the English originals, this study examines the lexical, syntactic, and discourse-level features of the Chinese Ministrys translated discourse. The findings reveal that, at the lexical level, the translated texts exhibit higher lexical density and longer average word length, and the frequency of high-frequency words is greater than that in the U.S. texts, indicating a tendency toward more formal and written style. At the sentence level, the average sentence length in the English translations is significantly longer than that of their U.S. counterparts. At the discourse level, the translated texts show a notable underuse of discourse markers, further indicating their formal and written characteristics. These features are probably attributed to the simplification principle in translation, and may also relate to China’s diplomatic traditions and political system. In particular, under the framework of government-led public diplomacy, the discourse of Chinese spokespersons tends to be cautious and standardized. The differences revealed in this study may offer insights into the narrative strategies for presenting China’s voice internationally, suggesting a more flexible strategy of translation and communication to better meet the expectations of target-language audiences.

Chinese ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson; English translated texts; Corpus-based approach; Features of translated English texts