English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies ISSN 2640-9836 (Print) ISSN 2640-9844 (Online) Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls 63 Original Paper A Corpus-based Study on Lexical Features in the English Version of Report on the Work of the Government (2003-2023) Binyi Ye1 1 Ningbo University, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China Fund Project 2023 The Science and Technology Innovation Project of University Students in Zhejiang Province: “The Construction of Zhejiang’s Image in Overseas English Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis Based on the NOW Corpus” (No.2023R405078) Received: January 22, 2024 Accepted: March 11, 2024 Online Published: March 22, 2024 doi:10.22158/eltls.v6n2p63 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/eltls.v6n2p63 Abstract In the context of globalization, China’s voice has been recognized by more and more countries. As the most important political document of China, The Report on the Work of the Government is the main content of translation research of political papers. Its translation provides a significant window for people worldwide to understand China comprehensively. Based on the corpus method, this paper analyzes the lexical features of the English version of Report on the Work of the Government (2003-2023) in terms of the average word length, the type-token ratio, keyword and high-frequency words to explore the image of China constructed, and offer experience for the translations of other publicity materials. Keywords Report on the Work of the Government, Corpus, Lexical features, English translation The forty-five years since the reform and opening up and socialist modernization has been truly momentous with China’s economic and political status reaching remarkable heights. Since the 20th National Congress, Xi Jinping has attached great importance to accelerating the construction of China’s international discourse system to convey China’s stories globally in the new era. As a political paper, the Report on the Work of the Government (hereinafter referred to as the Report) is one of the most authoritative sources for the outside world to understand China’s situation and political ideas, while its English version is an important part of China’s publicity materials to help the world understand China www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 64 Published by SCHOLINK INC. more comprehensively and objectively. 1. Literature Review In recent years, there has been a boom of research on the translation of the Report carried by domestic scholars. Among them, Wu Guangjun compares the specific differences between the Report and US’s State of the Union Address (hereafter referred to as Address) at the lexical and syntactic levels, and concludes the stylistic features of the Report (2011); Di Yanhua, Yang Zhong, Li Xiaoqian, Hu Kaibao and Shi Honghong focus on the keywords of the Report, and examine their collocation structure. Hu Kaibao and Tian Xujun further expand the scope of their study to analyse the linguistic features and textual effects of the Report (2000-2016) from the perspectives of words’ frequency and word class. Hu Yuanjiang identifies the collocation characteristics of the develop and its family and explores the interaction and influence of language and politics in the annual reports of the Chinese and American governments. Si Bingyue, Li Yong and Wu Meixuan, analyze nominalization and the application of model verbs. Wang Liyang, Huang Weiqi and other scholars focus on the lexical and syntactic differences of the Report (2016-2020). The Report is of time-sensitive and reflects the direction of China’s development. However, the existing researches are based more on materials in small quantity with a limited time span. There is little of insight in the English translation of the Report. Therefore, this paper applies the corpus method, with the assistance of the analysis software AntConc4.2.0, to conduct a comparative analysis of the lexical features of the Report (2003-2023) and the Address (2003-2023) in the past two decades. The aim is to better understand the different standpoints and attitudes expressed in the Report and the Address, and to provide reference for the translation of Chinese external publicity texts in the future. 2. Research Design 2.1 Corpus Data The Report on the Work of the Government is an official document issued by the State Council to summarize and plan the work of the government on an annual basis, covering important issues such as economic development, domestic and foreign affairs, and the people’s livelihood. The State of the Union Address is the annual report of the President of the United States to Congress. Although there are some differences in the number of tokens, they are still comparable. This paper is based on two self-built special corpora. One consists of 21 reports on the work of the government (about 316,100 words) in English version from 2003 to 2023 and another one contains 21 articles of the State of the Union Address of the United States (about 129,700 words) in the same period as the comparable corpus. Then here takes the CLOB, a member of the Brown family corpora, as the reference corpus to get the keyword list of the above 2 special corpora separately. The CLOB includes more than 1 million words. Although the total number of words in the two comparative corpora is different, they are somewhat comparable due to their types (both political documents) while they are all full text without tags. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 65 Published by SCHOLINK INC. The texts are obtained respectively from the website of the Central People’s Government of the PRC and The White House. The general description of the two self-built corpora is shown in Table 1: Table 1. General Description of the Data Selected Items Report on the Work of the Government State of the Union Address Time Span 2003—2023 2003—2023 Text_Count 21 21 Token_Count 316,107 129,700 In Total 445,807 2.2 Methodology This paper combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. Firstly, the corpus analysis tool AntConc4.2.0 developed by Lawrence Anthony is used to extract the basic information of the two self-built corpora each and generate two word lists to compare the general features, such as the average word length, Type-Token Ratio (TTR), and high-frequency words. Then, take the CLOB as a reference corpus to extract the top 20 keywords of two self-built corpora each (Table 5). Different keywords represent different themes of the governments’ work and focus. By comparing the two political documents, we can explore the differences in language collocation and political emphasis between the two political documents. Later, according to the current social hot spots in the construction of ecological civilization, this paper selects the relevant words in the Report, such as green and ecology, and then extracts and analyzes their collocation, so as to verify the accuracy of the translation, and provide experience for the translation of relevant topics in the future. 3. Results and Analysis According to the general characteristics of the words in the texts, this paper makes a comparison and specific analysis between the English version of the Report and the Address from five aspects: average word length, type-token ratio, keyword and frequency. 3.1 Average Word Length The average word length is the ratio of the total number of letters to the total number of words in a text, which can reflect the stylistic characteristics of the text. The standard deviation of word length is the degree to which the word length fluctuates around the average word length. Formal texts often use long words to highlight the stylistic features of their texts in order to distinguish them from informal or colloquial texts. For example, the five-year average word length for the three different text categories in the Brown corpus is 4.73 for newspaper texts (Category A, B, C), with a standard deviation of 2.59; 4.93 for academic texts (Category J), with a standard deviation of 2.87; and 4.31 for fiction (Category www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 66 Published by SCHOLINK INC. K, L, M), with a standard deviation of 2.18. The academic category is the most formal of the three, followed by the newspaper category, and then by the fiction category (Chen & Cui, 2010). This shows that there is a close relationship between the average word length and the degree of formality of the text. The following Table 2 shows the average word length and standard deviation of the two corpora of the Report and the Address. Table 2. Average Word Length Report Address Average Word Length 5.47 4.61 Standard Deviation 2.98 2.45 The statistics in Table 2 illustrate that the average word length of the Report are higher than the Address, indicating that the Chinese report is more formal than the latter. 3.2 Type-Token Ratio (TTR) Type-token Ratio (TTR for short) refers to the ratio of type to token in a specific corpus. The number of type is the number of different word forms and the number of token is the amount of words in the text. The mere type or token cannot reflect the essential feature of the text, but the ratio of the two can reflect the variability of words (Yang, 2002). Table 3 shows the information of the type, token, TTR and standardized TTR analyzed by AntConc4.2.0. Table 1. Type-Token Ratio Report Address Token_Count 316,107 129,700 Type_Count 8,682 9,226 TTR 2.75 7.11 Standardized TTR（%） 29.31 32.07 From Table 3, we can see the 2 corpora’s TTR are prominent indifferent. Due to the amounts of texts are relatively large in number, the mere TTR of the whole corpus can not scientifically reflect the difference in word richness so the Standardized TTR is taken as the basis. The standardized TTR of the Report (29.31) is smaller than that of the one in native language (32.07). On the one hand, this outcome reflects that native English speakers have larger vocabularies and use more various vocabularies; On the other hand, it shows that there are more replacement of frequently occurring words in actual use. For instance, in the Address (2018), the word storm is then replaced by hurricane. However, the translation of political materials in our country requires the use of strict terms and fixed collocations, which will lead to the repetition of synonyms and collocations. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 67 Published by SCHOLINK INC. For examples: (here O refers to Original; T refers to Translation) O: “三农” T: Agriculture, rural areas and farmers O: “四个全面” T: “The Four-pronged Comprehensive Strategy” (China’s strategic plan for building socialism with Chinese characteristics, that is, to make comprehensive moves to complete a moderately prosperous society in all respects, to further reform, to advance the rule of law, and to strengthen Party self-governance). In short, the diversity and variation of the language applied in the English version of the Report are generally lower than in those the Address written by native speakers. However, because of the repeated use of difficult terms, the English version of the Report is more difficult to understand than the Address. 3.3 Keyword Keyword refer to the words with greater discrepancy in frequency in the target corpus compared with the reference corpus, and the more significant the discrepancy, the stronger the keyness. By examining the linguistic features of keyword, we can effectively grasp the theme of the texts as a whole. This paper applies the keyword function of AntConc4.2.0 and takes the CLOB corpus as the reference corpus to extract the keyword of the Report and the Address from 2003 to 2023 respectively. Table 4 and Table 5 are obtained: Table 4. Keyword List of the Report www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 68 Published by SCHOLINK INC. Table 5. Keyword Lists of the 2 Corpora Table 5 illustrates that there are 19 content words (95%) in the list of the Report, and only 1 function word (5%), while there are only 11 content words (55%) and 9 function words (45%) in the Address. Figure 1. Lexical Comparison According to the statistics in the table 5 above, the keyword of the Report includes development, rural, improve, reform, economic, china, system, government, strengthen, enterprises, etc. while the one of the Address is the, and, to, we, of, in, a, our, I, have, American, will, etc. The difference between the two lists partly reflects that the focus of the Report is more concentrated and clear than that of the Address. By focusing on the content words appearing in the top 100 list in the Report, we can get a rough idea of the work priorities of the Chinese government from 2003 to 2023. Some of them are summarized in the following Table 6: www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 69 Published by SCHOLINK INC. Table 2. List of Top 100 Content Words of the Report we implement growth accordance promoting will develop services governments stability development policies policy economy china’s rural central regions grain new improve efforts law residents ethnic reform our progress cultural industrial economic chinese should improved macao areas basic encourage public income china investment oversight medical fully system industries deepen administrative supply promote major employment million consumption government social accelerate year technological strengthen people billion energy security enterprises education insurance opening tax yuan agricultural production strengthened improving increase market must trade interests urban cooperation agriculture percent socialist ensure support measures quality poverty work innovation stable overseas programs continue projects expand national capacity Figure 2. A Wordcloud of the Keyword of the Report Table 6 shows that the Chinese government is concerned about the people’s livelihood, economy, development and other issues, especially rural issues. The content words in the top 100 high-frequency keywords of the Address can also reflect the focus of the US government (not listed here), but the www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 70 Published by SCHOLINK INC. frequency and percentage of these content words in the top 100 high-frequency words indicate that the issues concerned by the Address are more, and more scattered. In addition, the pronouns I and you appear in the high-frequency words of the Address. Although both of them are obviously less than the Report, which belongs to the political discourse style, the Report is more formal the Address, which shows a certain tendency of colloquial language. Meanwhile, we can see that in the Report (2003-2023), we ranked first, which could shorten the distance between the government and the people, indicating that China has always adhered to the purpose and principle of “people-oriented”, and made due contributions to creating a harmonious society. The word will is mostly used in the future tense to indicate the work plan contained in the report and to express the nation’s strong expectations of future development and progress. The words we and will also appear in the Address (2003-2023), with we ranking second, but relatively less thematic than the Report. In addition, development, reform and China are highly thematic in the Report, which shows that China, as the largest developing country, attaches great importance to reform and development in economy, education and other aspects. 3.4 Selected Words In 2022, the report of the 20th National Congress clearly points that nature is the basic condition for the survival and development of human being. Respecting, adapting to and protecting nature are inherent requirements for establishing a modern socialist country in an all-round way. Based on the demands of ecological civilization construction mentioned in the Five-Sphere Integrated Plan, China is currently focusing on ecological construction with the assets of “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable” and the goals of “reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality”. Therefore, this paper chooses words related to ecological construction, such as green and ecological, to explore the attention paid to ecology in the Report, and apply the corpus tool AntConc4.2.0 to query word frequency and retrieve its relevant collocation. Table 3. Figures of Selected Words concerning Ecology Word Rank Freq Range NormFreq NormRange environment 1 309 21 585227.273 1 environmental 2 188 21 356060.606 1 ecological 3 139 21 958620.69 1 sustainable 4 57 21 919354.839 1 green 5 56 14 1000000 0.667 carbon 6 34 9 1000000 0.429 circumstances 7 27 15 450000 0.714 environments 8 18 12 34090.909 0.571 environmentally 9 13 7 24621.212 0.333 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 71 Published by SCHOLINK INC. ecology 10 3 3 20689.655 0.143 gynecological 11 2 2 13793.103 0.095 ecologically 12 1 1 6896.552 0.048 In this paper, several words with high correlation with ecological construction are selected, here comes the Table 7, which illustrates that China attaches great importance to ecology. Compared with traditional words such as environment and ecological, many a relatively new words such as sustainable, green and carbon have emerged successively. In this section, we continue to use the corpus analysis tool AntConc4.2.0. In this software, In this paper, I use the Likelihood measurement method to take statistical tests, setting the minimum collocation frequency of node words as 1, with a span of 5-5. Then I choose two words—“ecological” and “green”— for index and select the top 20 collocation words as the main objects. The word cloud map and related word lists are as follows: Figure 3. Word Cloud of the Collocation Table 4. Lists of Collocation of Ecological and Green Word ecological green Rank Collocate Likelihood Collocate Likelihood 1 conservation 417.411 development 65.371 2 protection 143.392 carbon 60.51 3 environmental 121.807 smart 36.576 4 environment 92.111 low 35.242 5 projects 69.752 circular 29.338 6 improvement 66.916 finance 27.333 7 damage 63.376 conservation 24.635 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 72 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 8 compensation 48.395 develop 23.951 9 compensating 36.512 appliances 22.551 10 political 32.119 environmentally 22.551 11 restoration 29.025 advances 22.496 12 sound 24.434 emissions 22.246 13 forestry 23.041 packaging 21.03 14 strengthen 22.877 specializing 21.03 15 progress 22.617 green 20.784 16 grassland 21.883 big 19.991 17 emissions 19.726 blue 19.97 18 for 19.151 element 19.342 19 and 19.097 home 19.274 20 cultural 19.058 gas 19.161 Table 5. Index of KWIC of two Selected Words By comparing the matching words with the text, we can find that China has added “strengthening www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024 73 Published by SCHOLINK INC. policy support” to the conventional environmental protection, and added “reducing the emission of carbon”, “green development” and “environment-friendly” to the content of measures such as “ecological engineering construction”. In addition to measures such as “construction of ecological projects”, new contents such as “carbon reduction”, “green development” and “environmental friendliness” have been added. We are required to plan our development on the basis of the original assertion that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable” and in harmony with nature. On the new journey of building a modern socialist country, China insists on promoting the construction of a beautiful China, ecological protection and systematic governance, coordinating industrial restructuring, pollution control and combating climate change, and promoting ecological priority, conservation and intensive, green and low-carbon development. This shows the goal and attitude of China towards environmental protection and high-quality development in the future. Compared to the translations of other aspects, the ecology-related translations tend to be simplified, with more concise wording and a tendency to translate directly from Chinese, which on the one hand indicates that China is increasingly having an ecological discourse in the international arena and its international influence is expanding. On the other hand the translations carry obvious Chinese characteristics, indicating China’s adherence to the path of cultural self-confidence and opening up new ideas for he translation of other publicity materials. 4. Conclusion Both our Report and the Address are among the most important political documents for promoting international communication. By analyzing and comparing the lexical features of the two political documents (2003-2023), and focusing on the ecological usage of words and collocations in the Report itself, this paper aims to understand the political, economic, cultural and social differences between the two countries more directly through a corpus perspective in order to better grasp the current development direction of China. The study found that: 1) the textual style of the Report is more formal than the Address, but the richness of vocabulary is also limited by the use of fixed expressions in translations; 2) there is a greater difference in the TTR between the Report and the Address; 3) the political focus of China and the US is different, with China focusing on development; 4); 4) the vocabulary used in the translation of China’s ecological civilization is different from that used in traditional publicity texts with Chinese characteristics. All in all, there is still a long way to go for the translation and promotion of publicity materials in China. This paper draws on the rational analysis of the corpora figures and summarizes some of the characteristics of existing translations. 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