Modern Social Science Research

The official English translation of China’s rural revitalization strategy features two coexisting variants: “rural revitalization” and “rural vitalization.” Using a corpus of English news texts from the Chinese Government Website (2017–2025), this study conducts a comparative analysis of their usage frequency, high-frequency words, keywords, and textual contexts. The results show that the two terms were used with similar frequency in the early stage of policy introduction, but a clear shift occurred in 2021, after which “rural revitalization” became dominant. High-frequency words and keywords indicate that “rural vitalization” is more typical of policy announcement discourse, while “rural revitalization” is more closely associated with national strategic discourse. Textual analysis reveals that after 2021, “rural revitalization” has been consistently used as the core term in macro-level planning, institutional arrangements, and top-level design, whereas “rural vitalization” has largely reverted to its original sense of “stimulating vitality,” serving only as an auxiliary expression in specific contexts. These differences reflect the interplay between policy evolution and semantic nuance. In translation practice, official terms should follow a principle of phased standardization, with timely alignment to evolving policy discourse.

Policy discourse; Rural revitalization; Term translation; Corpus analysis