Abstract：This paper reports on a bibliometric analysis of the research studies on political discourse translation published in China from 2000 to 2021. The findings indicate that 1) political discourse translation research in China has exhibited a roughly three-phase developmental trajectory: the beginning period (2000-2007), the developing period (2008-2016) and the expanding period (2017-2021); 2) the research has focused on four main themes: the qualitative analysis of strategies and methods for political discourse translation, the effectiveness of political discourse translation theory, the semantic translation of political terminology, political neologisms, culture-loaded words, and political metaphors, and the connection between the political discourse translation and political discourse communication; 3) the emerging frontiers in this research area include translations of the reports of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, ecological translation, political terminology translation, and the Skopos theory. These findings also show that more attention should be paid to issues, such as gaps between political discourse translation and political discourse communication, inadequacies of corpus-based quantitative studies, and needs for strengthening of interdisciplinary research across politics, communication, and linguistics.
Key words: political discourse; translation research; bibliometric analysis
