Translation universals of kak structures: a corpus-based approach

Abstract

Based on Russian-Chinese corpora, we explored 3 translation universals of Russian ‘kak structures’. We carried out the following analyses: 1. We categorized the structures into 7 groups, with 3 labeled as ‘splittable phrases’ (e.g. so…that) and four, ‘integral phrases’ (e.g. so that). The statistical analysis shows that translation correspondences of these groups differ from one another, which proves the hypothesis that hybridization features of correspondence exist in the translation of these structures; 2. By comparing the frequency of implicitation and explicitation in target texts with that in source texts, we proved both the hypotheses of inter-linguistic implicitation and explicitation. By comparing the frequency of the seven kak structures in the translational corpus with those in the comparable corpus, we proved the hypothesis of intra-linguistic explicitation; 3. We compared the frequency of (zhengru) and (yinwei) (both are typical Chinese equivalents of kak structures) that are placed after the main clause in both the target and the source text, with their frequency in the original texts and proved the foreignization hypothesis.