Meng Ji

Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A practical guide to descriptive translation research

This is a comprehensive guidebook to the quantitative methods needed for Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). It provides a systematic description of the various statistical tests used in Corpus Linguistics which can be used in translation research. In Part 1, Theoretical Explorations, the interplay between quantitative and qualitative methodologies is explored. Part 2, Essential Corpus Studies, describes how to undertake quantitative studies, with a suitable level of technical and relevant case studies. Part 3, Quantitative Explorations of Literary Translations, looks at translations of classic works by Cao Xueqin, James Joyce and other authors. Finally, Part 4 on Translation Lexis uses a variety of techniques new to translation studies, including multivariate analysis and game theory. This book is aimed at students and researchers of corpus linguistics, translation studies and quantitative linguistics. It will significantly advance current translation studies in terms of methodological innovation and will fill in an important gap in the development of quantitative methods for interdisciplinary translation studies.writing this workbook. Not only does it provide us with highly useful material for teaching the subject, but also the way the contents are presented allows professionals, undergraduates and postgraduate students to learn on their own. Furthermore, it presents a clear systematization of the main concepts of clinical pragmatics and summarizes the great challenges which researchers will have. This book is thus mandatory reading for all those working in clinical pragmatics.

Phraseology in corpus-based translation studies

Contents: Construction of a Parallel Corpus of Don Quijote - Corpus Data Retrieval and Annotation - Phraseological Patterns in Yangs Translation - Phraseological Patterns in Lius Translation - Use of Figurative/Archaic Idioms in the Two Translations - Quantitative Exploration of Style Variation in Lius Translation.

A quantitative semantic analysis of Chinese environmental media discourse

Abstract This study offers a first computer-aided semantical analysis of Chinese climate change news discourse. It explored the validity and productivity of the automatic Lancaster Semantic Analysis System (USAS). While USAS has been well tested in a number of studies for the English language and that the system has various language versions, its Chinese version has not been explored sufficiently in applied linguistics and cross-lingual and cross-cultural studies. The Chinese variation of USAS (CH_USAS) was instrumental in the statistical data modelling and construction of a data-driven analytical model for Chinese climate change news discourse. The model testing produced a mixed result which revealed both the efficiency and areas for improvement of this useful automatic cross-lingual semantic analysis system including the development and compilation of high-quality and updated English-Chinese bilingual terminologies for cross-lingual and cross-cultural environmental studies.

Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice and Back Again

When corpora began to be used in a systematic way for the empirical study of translation, Tymoczko (Computerized corpora and the future of translation studies. Meta 43(4):657, 1998) claimed that the appeal of corpus studies lay in their potential “to illuminate both similarity and difference and to investigate in a manageable form the particulars of language-specific phenomena of many different languages and cultures”. Today, the envisioned role of corpora as invaluable repositories of data for carrying out contrastive analyses across languages and cultures is a reality in descriptive as in applied studies.

Keywords—A Tool for Translation Analysis

This chapter gives a methodological overview of keyword analysis—a corpus-based method applied in translation studies for examining lexical features of comparable texts. It introduces the concept of keywords and characterizes different types of materials and research questions relevant for keyword analysis.

A Contextual Approach to Translation Equivalence

In this chapter I shall be looking at fictional dialogue in a translation corpus as a case study in a contextual approach to translation equivalence informed by quantitative corpus evidence and sociocultural analysis.

History in Keywords

In her presentation about the 10-year history of corpus-based translation studies, Laviosa (2003) divided this period into three stages. The first one, labelled by her as “the dawn”, comprises the years 1993–1996, when the idea of using corpus methods for descriptive translation research was introduced by Baker (1993, 1995, 1996).

A Corpus Analysis of Translation of Environmental News on BBC China

BBC China represents a complex news sourcing and reporting system. Sponsored by the BBC with a special focus on Chinese-speaking communities worldwide, it includes news materials collected from a wide variety of sources in original Chinese or in Chinese translations which are mainly rendered from English. An important source of news published on BBC China are selected translations of original English news published on the website of BBC UK.

Principal component analysis of the information structure of British English and Chinese genres

Abstract What is a textual genre? How do the genres of typologically different languages differ from each other? How systematic differences of the genre systems reveal variations among languages in terms of the information structure? These are fundamental research questions in contrastive linguistics. The central purpose of this paper is to investigate variations between textual genres of British English and Mandarin Chinese by using large-scale language data bases. The corpus analysis shows that textual genres of the two languages are different from each other systematically, which thus sheds new light on the inherent cognitive and cultural differences between the two language and cultural systems.