ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a corpus study of the social factors which have contributed to the introduction and cultural adaptation of values, principles and idea sets of environmental sustainability in China. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, our study explored large original Chinese multi-sectoral publication databases. The corpus analysis illustrated the changing patterns of the social dissemination and adaptation of sustainability materials in China, providing first-hand evidence of the country’s sustainable development strategies and agendas. Our study has made useful attempts at integrating qualitative and quantitative research methodologies from corpus translation studies and digital media analysis. To facilitate the development of empirical discourse analytical models, we have developed and used extensively existing and new multilingual environmental terminology databases, especially the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) developed by the European Environmental Agency and the Chinese-English Environmental Translation Terminology (CEETT).
