Hedging in interpreted and spontaneous speeches: a comparative study of Chinese and American political press briefings

The investigation of potential stylistic differences between translated and non-translated texts has been proven to be a promising line in corpus-based translation studies, yet similar research on the product of interpreting seems both smaller in scale and slower in development. This study compares the use of hedges in interpreted and spontaneous English speeches collected in similar settings. Specifically, we gathered the two types of speech data from Chinese and American political press briefings respectively and analyzed their differences in the employment of various hedging devices. The results show that interpreted speeches not only contain significantly fewer hedges but they are also dependent on a narrower range of such devices than spontaneous speeches, which is consistent with the tendency towards simplification in translations. Also, our findings suggest that interpreted and spontaneous speeches tend to follow distinct hedging patterns in terms of preferred linguistic choices. Potential factors triggering such differences are discussed.