A corpus-based study of the shifts of evidentiality in the institutional interpreting of Chinese political discourse

Abstract Despite the growing recognition of interpreters’ socio-political influence, their positioning in political discourse remains underexplored. This study examines the use of seven types of evidential markers in the Chinese political discourse on diplomacy and the shifts of evidentiality in the English interpreting based on a corpus of Chinese Foreign Minister’s press conferences and their corresponding simultaneous interpretations during the “Two Sessions” from 2020 to 2022. The findings reveal that the English interpretations of the Chinese political discourse demonstrate significant shifts in the use of evidential markers indicating belief, induction, deduction, credibility, and expectation, thus upgrading the certainty, commitment, and objectivity of the original political discourse and reducing its subjectivity. The evidential shifts provide insights into the positioning of institutional interpreters as political allies who actively participate in the sociological and ideological reconstruction of the political discourse. This study also highlights the role of evidentiality as a context-embedded discursive construct in the process of cross-linguistic entextualisation.