Hedges in Bidirectional Translations of Publicity-Oriented Documents

Abstract

Hedges are widely studied across registers and disciplines, yet research on the translation of hedges in political texts is extremely limited. This contrastive study is dedicated to investigating whether there is a diachronic change in the frequencies of hedging devices in the target texts, to what extent the changing frequencies of translated hedges through years are attributed to the source texts, and what translation strategies are adopted to deal with them. For the purposes of this research, two types of official political texts and their translations from China and the United Nations were collected to form three sub-corpora. Results show that hedges tend to appear more frequently in English political texts, be it original English or translated English. In addition, directionality seems to play an important role in influencing both the frequencies and translation strategies regarding the use of hedges. A noticeable diachronic increase of hedging devices is also observed in our corpus.