Abstract：Abstract: Researches on image building in bilingual contexts have mostly been confined to written texts. This article aims to explore the relationship between typical collocational behavior and the building of government leaders’ image in Chinese government press conference interpreting based on corpus approach. To this aim, the first person pronoun we was chosen as the node word for analysis and a comparison was made with that in the American government press conference texts. The results show that: first, we usually co-occurs with collocates in its exclusive use, referring to the leaders or the Chinese government, but it also appears in its inclusive use with certain collocates where special implications arise; second, we in interpreted texts significantly prefer to collocate with high-confidence sensory verbs, more formal and frequent volitive verbs, and a set of distinctive verbs with clearly positive semantic preference, which collectively contribute to shaping an image of confidence, sincerity and enterprise for government leaders. This study has shown that corpus-based collocational analysis is an effective approach for studying discourse shaping and image building.
Key words: collocational co-occurrence; Chinese-English conference interpreting; image; corpus
