  Hedges are widely studied across registers and disciplines, yet research on
the translation of hedges in political texts is extremely limited. This
contrastive study is dedicated to investigating whether there is a diachronic
change in the frequencies of hedging devices in the target texts, to what
extent the changing frequencies of translated hedges through years are
attributed to the source texts, and what translation strategies are adopted to
deal with them. For the purposes of this research, two types of official
political texts and their translations from China and the United Nations were
collected to form three sub-corpora. Results show that hedges tend to appear
more frequently in English political texts, be it original English or
translated English. In addition, directionality seems to play an important role
in influencing both the frequencies and translation strategies regarding the
use of hedges. A noticeable diachronic increase of hedging devices is also
observed in our corpus.
