The Features of Translational Chinese and Translation Universals

  • Richard Xiao
  • Xianyao Hu
Chapter
Part of the New Frontiers in Translation Studies book series (NFTS)

Abstract

We have so far analysed and compared translational and non-translational or native Chinese as represented by our corpora LCMC and ZCTC in terms of their macro-statistic features in Chap.  5 and the lexical and grammatical characteristics in Chaps.  6 and  7, while the present chapter is an interface between the empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses, that is, it is a combination of descriptive translation studies with the “pure translation theory” (Holmes 1972/1988). It is important to find these connections for the reason that without a higher level of generalisation, empirical and quantitative discoveries can be meaningless or aimless. We will first of all summarise the discriminatory features of translational Chinese at different levels and then discuss the implications, if any, of these translation specific features to translation universals hypotheses reviewed in Chap.  3. Due to the fact that the translated corpus (ZCTC) used as the basis of this research consists mostly of translated texts from English and that the parallel corpus (GCEPC) which is used whenever necessary is a corpus of English and Chinese translation, our generalisation for the sake of translation universals should be limited within the particular realm of English-to-Chinese translation.

Keywords

Function Word Word Class Parallel Corpus Chinese Text Chinese Translation 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Richard Xiao
    • 1
  • Xianyao Hu
    • 2
  1. 1.Linguistics and English LanguageLancaster UniversityLancasterUK
  2. 2.College of International StudiesSouthwest UniversityChongqingChina

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