A Corpus-Based Study of Ideological Manipulation from Appraisal Theory in Hong Kong Political Interpreting Discourse

It is noticeable that there are three principles in evaluating interpreting quality: interpreters' professional skills, real-time epistemic competences and interpreting norms. This study focuses on interpreter's manipulative strategies from appraisal theory developed by Jeremy Munday as a major target in the political translation task and explores how governmental statements and reports are interpreted bilingually in Hong Kong. There is a chosen interpreting corpus of 10 transcribed HKSAR policy addresses delivered by two Hong Kong chief executives from 2007 to 2016, indicating the norms of source and target texts. High frequency keywords were selected, identified and analyzed within the corpus. The framework of ideological manipulation was used to describe the interpreting tasks and to exhibit the process where ideology is often taken for granted. This research aims to find that there are lexical preferences by interpreters in the speech full of political, social and ideological issues. The study also employs empirical approaches in both qualitative and quantitative approaches.