Xianyao Hu

Corpus-based studies of translational Chinese in English-Chinese translation

Notes for transcription.- Abbreviations.- Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- Corpus-based Translation Studies: An evolving paradigm.- Exploring the features of translational language.- Corpora and corpus tools in use.- The macro-statistic features of translational Chinese.- The lexical features of translational Chinese.- The grammatical features of translational Chinese.- The features of translational Chinese and Translation Universals.- Conclusive remarks.

How do English translations differ from non-translated English writings? A multi-feature statistical model for linguistic variation analysis

Abstract This paper discusses the debatable hypotheses of “Translation Universals”, i. e. the recurring common features of translated texts in relation to original utterances. We propose that, if translational language does have some distinctive linguistic features in contrast to non-translated writings in the same language, those differences should be statistically significant, consistently distributed and systematically co-occurring across registers and genres. Based on the balanced Corpus of Translational English (COTE) and its non-translated English counterpart, the Freiburg-LOB corpus of British English (FLOB), and by deploying a multi-feature statistical analysis on 96 lexical, syntactic and textual features, we try to pinpoint those distinctive features in translated English texts. We also propose that the stylo-statistical model developed in this study will be effective not only in analysing the translational variation of English but also be capable of clustering those variational features into a “translational” dimension which will facilitate a crosslinguistic comparison of translational languages (e. g. translational Chinese) to test the Translation Universals hypotheses.

The Features of Translational Chinese and Translation Universals

We have so far analysed and compared translational and non-translational or native Chinese as represented by our corpora LCMC and ZCTC in terms of their macro-statistic features in Chap. 5 and the lexical and grammatical characteristics in Chaps. 6 and 7, while the present chapter is an interface between the empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses, that is, it is a combination of descriptive translation studies with the “pure translation theory” (Holmes 1972/1988). It is important to find these connections for the reason that without a higher level of generalisation, empirical and quantitative discoveries can be meaningless or aimless. We will first of all summarise the discriminatory features of translational Chinese at different levels and then discuss the implications, if any, of these translation specific features to translation universals hypotheses reviewed in Chap. 3. Due to the fact that the translated corpus (ZCTC) used as the basis of this research consists mostly of translated texts from English and that the parallel corpus (GCEPC) which is used whenever necessary is a corpus of English and Chinese translation, our generalisation for the sake of translation universals should be limited within the particular realm of English-to-Chinese translation.

Corpora and Corpus Tools in Use

This chapter will introduce the corpora used in the research; first, the Chinese reference corpora and second, the two comparable corpora of native and translational Chinese, namely, the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) and the Zhejiang University Corpus of Translational Chinese (ZCTC). In the second half of this chapter, we will also introduce the corpus analytical tools that we resort to during the research.

Corpus-Based Translation Studies: An Evolving Paradigm

This chapter discusses the role played by corpus linguistics in contemporary translation studies in past decades. We will begin with an introduction to the fundamental reformative influence of corpus linguistics upon the methodologies of the contemporary linguistic research, which is then followed by a more detailed description of the most frequently used types of corpora, particularly multilingual corpora, in contrastive linguistic research and translation studies. We will also introduce a growing paradigm of research by exploring the latest developments in corpus-based translation studies.

The Macro-Statistic Features of Translational Chinese

In this chapter, we will investigate the macro-statistic features of translational Chinese based on contrastive analyses of the corpus of translational Chinese (ZCTC) and the corpus of non-translational or native Chinese (LCMC). These macro-statistic linguistic features involve a wide range of corpus linguistic parameters, such as lexical density, textual information load, high-frequency words, low-frequency words, average word length, average sentence length, average sentence segment length, average paragraph length and word clusters, which will be analysed and discussed in detail in the following sections.

The Grammatical Features of Translational Chinese

Having provided meticulous descriptions of the lexical properties of translational Chinese, we will now look further into the grammatical features of translational Chinese by investigating and comparing a wide range of linguistic features in translated and native Chinese corpora. Many of these features are unique syntactical constructions and grammatical structures of Chinese such as the 被bei passive construction (7.1), the disposal把 ba construction (7.2), the existential 有 you sentence (7.3), the copula是 shi (7.4), the所 suo construction (7.5) and the 连 lian construction (7.6) as well as grammatical categories such as classifiers (7.7), aspect markers (7.8), structural auxiliaries (7.9) and modal particles (7.10).

The Lexical Features of Translational Chinese

As we note in the previous chapter, translational Chinese has shown some statistically distinct lexical features from non-translational Chinese as exemplified by lower lexical density (namely, smaller proportion of content words in relation to function words, which is usually taken as an indicator of the textual information load of a text or corpus), repetitive use of high-frequency words and extremely low-frequency words, preference for longer words, quantitative and qualitative differences in word clusters, etc. This chapter will demonstrate in greater detail the specific lexical features of translational Chinese ranging from part-of-speech distribution, keywords and key word classes to case studies on pronouns, conjunctions, idioms and reformulation markers.

Exploring the Features of Translational Language

As discussed in the previous chapter, the convergence between corpus linguistics and translation studies since the early 1990s has greatly facilitated what Toury (1995) calls “product-oriented translation research”, helping to bring up systematic methodologies and trustworthy empirical data to the discipline. One of the most important topics in contemporary descriptive translation studies is the discussion of translation universals (TUs) and the related hypotheses, i.e. the exploration of the typical features of translational language as a linguistic variant in existence in itself. As observed by Hansen and Teich (2001: 44), “it is commonly assumed in translation studies that translations are specific kinds of texts that are not only different from their original source language (SL) texts, but also from comparable original texts in the same language as the target language (TL)”. Their observation, in general, has been supported by many corpus-based studies which give evidence of the linguistic features that differentiate the translated texts from the SL as well as from the TL native writings. It seems widely recognised that translations cannot possibly avoid the effect of translationese (cf. Hartmann 1985; Baker 1993: 243–245; Teubert 1996: 247; Gellerstam 1996; Laviosa 1997: 315; McEnery and Wilson 2001: 71–72; McEnery and Xiao 2002, 2007b).