Policy addresses are important government documents that convey the government’s policies and publicize the government’s work plan set for the coming year, and at the same time, carry important information about social and economic developments. This paper studies the policy addresses of Macao SAR in the post-handover period. It aims at investigating how discourse reflect the change in Macao’s ideologies in the post-handover period and how translation, as a frame itself, (Baker, 2006) functions in the process of ideologies construction. With Halliday’s sociocultural perspectives towards language (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), this paper conducts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to the policy addresses released in two-decade time by the two chief executives of the first four terms of Macao SAR government in the post-handover period. The analysis shows that the diction in this particular discourse type reflects the changes in the development of Macao and in the relationship between government and the audience in the investigated period. It is argued that a corpus-assisted investigation can help reveal how discourse is shaped by social practice and how discourse and translation process function in constructing ideologies, which reflect the dialectical relationship between discourse and social realities.
