Corpus-Based Studies of Translational Chinese in English–Chinese Translation (2015). Richard Xiao and Xianyao Hu.

Abstract

Corpus-Based Studies of Translational Chinese in English–Chinese Translation (2015). Richard Xiao and Xianyao Hu. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-642-41362-9 Translation universals (TUs) have been one of the research foci in corpus translation studies ever since Baker initiated this line of research in 1993.One key research effort has been to test out the TU hypotheses by bringing in different languages and cultures into the picture (Laviosa, 2011). However, the Anglo-centric bias in the pursuit of TUs is obvious, and evidence is, by and large, limited within the European languages, English in particular. This book by Xiao and Hu (2015) provides a much needed perspective and directs their efforts towards investigating the linguistic features of translational Chinese by probing into two genetically different languages, Chinese and English. The readers should be delighted to find that on the one hand, ‘translated texts in Chinese share a number of common properties’ (ibid. p. 172) of the TUs as have been in previous studies (e.g. Baker, 1996), and on the other hand, the previously defined and discussed TUs may be too over-generalized or simplified to reveal the true features of translational language, as a result of which we may need more refined TUs. In their book, Xiao and Hu mainly seek to answer the question, that is, to what extent the features of translational Chinese are in line with previous studies of TU hypotheses, such as explicitation, simplification, normalization, under-representation, convergence, and source language (SL) shining through. For that purpose, a detailed analysis was made of the typical linguistic features of translational Chinese from macro-statistic to specific lexical and grammatical level using a comparable corpus design involving the Lancaster Corpus Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) and … suwenchao0617{at}126.com