Modern Social Science Research

Shaping China’s national image through linguistic symbols is a necessary measure for enhancing China’s soft power and strengthening its international discursive capacity. As an important channel for communicating China’s voice and presenting its development achievements to the outside world, the translation of external publicity texts undertakes the mission of national image construction. The construction and application of corpora can provide quantitative research methods for studies on external publicity translation and national image, broaden theoretical perspectives, and enhance the objectivity, scientific rigor, and explanatory power of research findings. This article introduces the basic procedures involved in constructing a self-built Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of External Publicity Texts (2011-2025), including corpus collection, corpus processing, and corpus retrieval. It further outlines the main research pathways for studies on the English translation of external publicity texts and national image from the perspectives of linguistic feature analysis, image representation, interpretation of image formation, textual construction strategies, and discursive construction strategies, with the aim of offering methodological reference for corpus-based research on translation and national image.

External publicity texts; Translation; National image; Corpus construction; Research pathways