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ZANG Jinglei
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2026.06.004
Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China
The Premier’s Press Conference serves as a vital window for China’s international political communication, in which the interpretation of culture-loaded words—such as idioms, proverbs, and poetic allusions—directly affects the accuracy of information delivery and the construction of national image. Based on a self-built Chinese-English interpreting corpus of the 2023 Premier’s Press Conference of the 14th National People’s Congress, this study conducts a comparative analysis of the strategies employed by human interpreters and a machine interpreting system in handling culture-loaded words. Through detailed analysis of eight representative cases, the study finds that human interpreters predominantly adopt strategies of free translation, amplification, and shift to convey cultural connotations and achieve communicative effects, whereas machine interpreting tends to use literal translation, simplification, or omission, which often results in loss of cultural imagery and rhetorical nuances despite its advantages in speed and terminological consistency. The paper further explores the differences between the two interpreting agents in coping with cultural gaps, contextual dependency, and rhetorical functions, and proposes possible paths for human-machine collaboration in political interpreting based on the framework of eco-translatology and communicative translation theory.
culture-loaded words, political discourse, interpreting strategies, human-machine comparison, Premier’s Press Conference
ZANG Jinglei. A Comparative Study on Human and Machine Interpreting Strategies for Culturally Loaded Words in Chinese Political Discourse. US-China Foreign Language, June 2026, Vol. 24, No.
6, 227-234 doi:10.17265/1539-8080/2026.06.004
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