Abstract
This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.
Highlights
The quest for translation universals (TUs) using corpus-based translation methods spearheaded by Baker [1, 2] paved the way for a new wave of academic research into the unique features of translational language
As the 13 measures differed vastly in the raw scores, we first turned them into z-scores so that they were on the same scale
This study was aimed at identifying the simplification features in translated texts using syntactic complexity measures to compare between translated English from Chinese and the nontranslated native English writing
Summary
The quest for translation universals (TUs) using corpus-based translation methods spearheaded by Baker [1, 2] paved the way for a new wave of academic research into the unique features of translational language. Divergences between translated and non-translated texts in target language (TL) have led to translation being portrayed stereotypically and derogatively as “translationese” which is caused by the translator’s incompetence [7]. The quest for TUs has a long history and has contributed to the establishment of translation studies as an independent discipline. This line of research has helped provide insights into identifying what exactly translating is, and unveil the unique features of translational languages. Despite the controversies surrounding the concept, corpus-based research into TUs has been one of the most important methodological advances in translation studies [14]
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