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Exploring the Features of Translational Language

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Corpus-Based Studies of Translational Chinese in English-Chinese Translation

Part of the book series: New Frontiers in Translation Studies ((NFTS))

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Abstract

As discussed in the previous chapter, the convergence between corpus linguistics and translation studies since the early 1990s has greatly facilitated what Toury (1995) calls “product-oriented translation research”, helping to bring up systematic methodologies and trustworthy empirical data to the discipline. One of the most important topics in contemporary descriptive translation studies is the discussion of translation universals (TUs) and the related hypotheses, i.e. the exploration of the typical features of translational language as a linguistic variant in existence in itself. As observed by Hansen and Teich (2001: 44), “it is commonly assumed in translation studies that translations are specific kinds of texts that are not only different from their original source language (SL) texts, but also from comparable original texts in the same language as the target language (TL)”. Their observation, in general, has been supported by many corpus-based studies which give evidence of the linguistic features that differentiate the translated texts from the SL as well as from the TL native writings. It seems widely recognised that translations cannot possibly avoid the effect of translationese (cf. Hartmann 1985; Baker 1993: 243–245; Teubert 1996: 247; Gellerstam 1996; Laviosa 1997: 315; McEnery and Wilson 2001: 71–72; McEnery and Xiao 2002, 2007b).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Richard Xiao

  2. College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Xianyao Hu

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Xiao, R., Hu, X. (2015). Exploring the Features of Translational Language. In: Corpus-Based Studies of Translational Chinese in English-Chinese Translation. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41363-6_3

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