Investigating translation style in English translations of Chinese editorials and commentaries from the Hong Kong Economic Journal: a corpus stylistic analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous studies on translator’s or translation style have mostly focused on literary works. This study is a stylistic analysis of Chinese-language editorials and commentaries published in the Hong Kong Economic Journal (HKEJ) and their print and web versions of English translations. The study includes a corpus analysis of the original and translated news texts’ average sentence length, standardized type-token ratio, reporting verbs and high-frequency words. These are interpreted in relation to the translators’ personal attributes and the socio-cultural contexts to identify several major factors contributing to stylistic differences. This study finds that the news translation style is influenced by both source language linguistic features and target language conventions. The production of translated news texts involves the input of multiple agents, which is demonstrated in the collective traces of translation styles. The stylistic shifts between the original and translated news editorials and commentaries reflect the news outlet’s editorial stance and targeted readership. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the critical role stylistic features play in Chinese-to-English journalistic translation.