Gender Difference in Vague Words: A Corpus-based Study in Chinese-English Political Interpreting

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_284How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Gender difference; Vague words; Political interpreting

Abstract

Vagueness is often used in discursive contexts, where people often use vague concepts to avoid problems, be polite and maintain face. And due to the sensitive nature of political interpreting, the use of vague words in political interpreting is a key concern for scholars. At the same time, due to gender differences, male and female interpreters do not only handle them inconsistently in translation, but also pay attention on handling them in interpretation. This paper focuses on the choice and use of vague words by male and female interpreters in the political interpreting environment. The main purpose is to explore the frequency of the use of vague words by male and female in political interpreting, and to summarise the top 100 most frequently used vague words. There is no detailed discussion on the treatment of ambiguous words in specific contexts and principles. This paper focuses on the differences in the use of 'seem' and 'likely' between males and females. This is followed by a summary of the lexical aspects of ambiguous words in political interpreting. These studies and analyses show the differences in the use of vague words by male and female interpreters in political interpreting, and their ability to handle them, which can help us to strengthen the training of interpreters in handling this type of words in future interpreting training, especially in sensitive interpreting environments such as political interpreting, and to improve the sensitivity of vague words.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Bing Xiong
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/30
TI  - Gender Difference in Vague Words: A Corpus-based Study in Chinese-English Political Interpreting
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 2470
EP  - 2480
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_284
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_284
ID  - Xiong2022
ER  -