Syntactic and typological properties of translational language: A comparative description of dependency treebank of academic abstracts

Abstract

Translational language, the language of translated texts, is distinct from both the source and the target language. Although there are many studies on translational language, they present contradictory results. This paper aims to investigate the syntactic and typological properties of translational language by adopting the two main indices of dependency grammar: mean dependency distance (MDD) and dependency direction. A comparable dependency treebank, consisting of translated and non-translated English abstracts, was built and quantitatively described. The results show that (1) the MDD of translational English is significantly longer than that of non-translational English, which can be explained by the difference in MDD of the main grammatical relations (subject, object, attribute and adverbial); (2) the MDD of translational English is within the threshold of four; (3) translational English has more head-final and fewer head-initial dependencies, which can be explained by the distributional differences of the four grammatical relations; (4) translational English has the same word order preference for SV-VO-AdjN as non-translational English, but there are more AdjN and fewer SV pairs in translational English. These findings show the effect of source language interference and suggest that a quantitative method is valid for a holistic and systemic description of translational language.