BRAIN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience-A Corpus-driven Study of Contrastive Markers in Cantonese‒English Political Interpreting

A parallel corpus, consisting of policy addresses delivered by Chief Executives in Hong Kong (about 0.22 million words) and their English interpretations (about 0.29 million words), was used in the study. The Cantonese contrastive markers — bat gwo and daan (hai) (comparable in meaning to however and but respectively in English), and their renditions in English — were compared and analyzed. The two Cantonese contrastive markers were found to correspond to a variety of renditions in English.

These findings show how interpreters apply pragmatic strategies when dealing with the extreme situations in political interpreting. They shed light on the development of e-learning for pragmatic competence training of interpreters working in political settings, as well as natural language processing applications for handling such a high-level linguistic feature.