Abstract
This chapter begins with an overview of the studies on translational Chinese over the past decades in China. Traditionally, translation studies would take translational language as a source of examples for the discussion of translation techniques, the focus being on the choice of words or structures; little is said about the language as a whole. Nowadays, translational language is an independent system or variety, of which the holistic and macroscopic features become accessible in the era of corpus linguistics under the strong support of IT. In China, corpus-based translation studies have a history of a mere 10 years. However, such a short period marks a rapid development both in the building of parallel corpus and researches on that basis. A good case in point is the employment of parallel corpora in the study of the development of Mandarin in the twentieth century. In this study, we look into the evolution of Mandarin from a CLC (construction’s load capacity) perspective. It finds that the evolution of Mandarin is clearly shown in the increase of CLC and in the structural complexity of the constituents in the constructions, and it goes in parallel with the sudden and rapid changes typical of translational Mandarin after the May 4th Movement. However, it should be noted that, considering what original Mandarin selectively replicates are the features of translational language but not those of the source language (Western languages), the so-called Europeanization does not exist.
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Notes
- 1.
The term loc stands for localizer in Mandarin; Num stands for number; CL stands for classifier, or a measure word. For example, 一-头 is composed by 一 (Num, ‘one’) and 头 (CL, ‘head’).
- 2.
According to Douglas and Miller (2016), factors with significant correlations with complexity across writing and reading samples are lexile, mean length sentence (MLS), mean length clause (MLC), and complex nominals per T-unit (CN/T). In our research, the length of the modifiers, the number of modifiers, and the use of pre-positioned clausal modifiers all contribute to syntactic complexity.
- 3.
As is found in Ji (2010: 39–40), in translating multilayered Castilian sentences into Mandarin (the same is true for translation from English to Mandarin), the long sentences in the source text tend to get broken down into a number of relatively shorter clauses, and these elements are then rearranged or inserted in specific positions of a sentential sequence that is familiar to the Mandarin readership.
- 4.
By active, we mean they are major sentence constituents used to locate events in time and place (P-L), or to act as subjects or objects (NC-NP or DC-NP).
- 5.
We choose not to talk about NC-NP construction in the present study, for the construction is also contained in the P-L construction, or partially overlaps with the DC-NP construction.
- 6.
A typical Mandarin encoding of the relations in Example (5a) could be as follows:
彪形 大汉 坐 在 他 旁边,穿 一身 黑 拷绸 衣裤。 汽车夫 轻声地 对 他 说:
[Gloss] husky fellow sit beside him, wear whole body black silk clothes. Car man says in a low voice to him.
In this Mandarin encoding, more clauses are used, which is a typical way of encoding such relation.
- 7.
‘Structurally loose modifier’, means the modifier is a full clause (e.g. 相貌 并 不 惊人, literally ‘appearance is not attractive’) is structurally not as compact as a one-word modifier or a phrasal one.
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Qin, H., Kong, L., Chu, R. (2020). The Role of Translation Played in the Evolution of Mandarin: A Corpus-based Account. In: Hu, K., Kim, K. (eds) Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21440-1_2
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