Testing the unique item hypothesis with phrasal verbs in Chinese–English translations of Lu Xun’s short stories: the perspective of translation directionality

Abstract

The present study revisits the unique item hypothesis (UIH) from the perspective of translation directionality in the Chinese–English(C–E) language pair. Phrasal verb (PV) is used as the linguistic feature to investigate whether UIH holds true in C–E translations and whether translation directionality plays a role in the representation of unique items, based on a self-built parallel corpus of Lu Xun’s short stories and their English translations done by two L1 and two L2 translators, and a reference corpus of BNC short stories as the non-translated reference. It is found PVs are significantly over-represented in C–E translated texts when compared with English non-translated texts, and this overrepresentation is mainly attributed to the remarkable use of PVs by L1 translators; and there is a significant difference in the use of PVs by translators of different directionality, while no significant difference is found within the same direction. Additionally, L2 translators tend to use a limited range of PVs and prefer transparent PVs to semi-transparent and opaque ones. The results falsify the UIH in general and suggest that UIH is a conditional translation tendency constrained by translation directionality, or UIH is directionality-dependent. Gravitational pull model is used to analyze and explain the divergence between different translation directions.