Xiao, Richard (2011) Word clusters and reformulation markers in Chinese and English:Implications for translation universal hypotheses. Languages in Contrast, 11 (2). pp. 145-171. ISSN 1387-6759
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This article presents a corpus-based contrastive study of word clusters and reformulation markers in Chinese and English, and discusses the implications of the findings for translation universal hypotheses. The study is based on three balanced comparable corpora which represent British English, native Chinese and translational Chinese in addition to an English-Chinese parallel corpus which provides a basis for comparing native and translated English and investigating explicitation in translation. Our results show that word clusters are substantially more common in translated Chinese, suggesting a tendency in translations to use fixed and semi-fixed recurring patterns in an attempt to achieve improved fluency. The more frequent use of word clusters, especially those of high frequency and high coverage in translational Chinese, is also likely to be a result of the influence of the English source language because word clusters are significantly more prevalent in native English in relation to native Chinese. Chinese and English tend to use reformulation markers of different styles while on the other hand, reformulation markers are generally more common in both translated English and translated Chinese than in their native counterparts, suggesting that reformulation markers function as a strategy for explicitation in translations, which tend to use oral, stylistically simpler forms than non-translated texts.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Journal or Publication Title: | Languages in Contrast |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Chinese/English ; reformulation marker ; translation universal ; word cluster |
| Subjects: | UNSPECIFIED |
| Departments: | Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences > Linguistics & English Language |
| ID Code: | 56754 |
| Deposited By: | ep_importer_pure |
| Deposited On: | 15 Aug 2012 12:14 |
| Refereed?: | Yes |
| Published?: | Published |
| Last Modified: | 04 Jan 2013 15:15 |
| Identification Number: | |
| URI: | http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/56754 |
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