4.1 Introduction

In discussing the hybridity realized by translation in colonial and postcolonial situations (see Sect. 2.3, Chap. 2), Venuti (1998) concludes by taking with China as a case study. At the end of the Qing dynasty, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, China “presents a rich instance of translators intent on building a national culture by importing foreign literatures. Chinese translators pursued a program of modernization by introducing numerous Western works of fiction and philosophy” (Venuti 1998, pp. 178–179). The translations “result in a powerful hybridity” and “promote the idea that the classic Chinese they employed was inadequate to the task of understanding and absorbing foreign knowledge” (Gunn 1991, p. 33), with the result that the translations “contribute to the emergence of a cultural discourse in Mandarin vernacular” (Venuti 1995, p. 183).

Translation began to make a strong impact on Chinese at the end of Qing dynasty, and the early decades of the twentieth century saw a number of innovations transform the written language: vernacular Chinese (báihuà) displaced classic Chinese (wényán), and the subsequent translations of Western works into Chinese made the interlingual hybrid features, i.e., the Europeanized Chinese, prevalent in translated and non-translated Chinese texts. This chapter offers an exploration of the Anglicisms in modern written Chinese, reviews the previous research on the hybridity in translated Chinese, and attempts to describe the influence of language contact on the Chinese language.

4.2 Background of Anglicisms in Modern Written Chinese

The Chinese language changed greatly after the May Fourth movement in 1919. The replacement of wényán with báihuà as the base of MWC (modern written Chinese) became a hot topic of the New Culture Movement, which began just before 1920 and included three themes, i.e., the Literary Revolution, democracy and science. The aim of the movement was to create a “culture more consonant with modern times and the common people” (Chen 1993, p. 509). Since the standard written wényán was divorced from actual speech, it stood as the main obstacle to a higher literacy rate. Báihuà was chosen as the replacement and served as the base for a standard written language for all functions, including the literary, scholarly, and official (ibid.).

The modernization movement attracted a number of elites to change society and language to save China from exploitation and division by those who were seen as Western imperial colonizers. At the later period of the Qing Dynasty, especially during the Opium Wars (1839–1862), Lin Zexu (1785–1850), Wei Yuan (1794–1856), and Guo Chongtao (1818–1891) appealed to their compatriots to “learn from the advanced technologies in the West in order to resist the invasion of the Western powers” (师夷长技以制夷: shīyí chángjì yǐ zhìyí), and suggested setting up some translation organizations and schools to train translators. They adopted translation as an important tool to introduce Western concepts, ideas, and thoughts (Yuan 2006; Wang 2011, p. 92). The translators paid attention to the question of whether the translated language—the translation medium—should be wényán or báihuà. Yan Fu (1854–1921), one of the famous translators at that time, adopted the elegant wényán as his translation medium, because he believed that his translations should be read by the elites.

The New Culture Movement called for báihuà as the medium which can be used to enlighten the people more generally. However, báihuà, as a new-born language, was thought to be vulgar and had to be improved and polished with help of foreign languages. Wang (1999) studied the changing position of classic Chinese (wényán) and vernacular Chinese (báihuà) in the English to Chinese translation in the late Qing Dynasty and discussed the social, linguistic need to import the Western features and adopt the Western ways of expression and sentence structures in vernacular Chinese through translation. The May Fourth Movement promoted báihuà as the standard written language, and people thought that it could be enriched by borrowing some language items such as vocabulary, morphological and syntactic features from foreign languages by translation (Wang 2000, p. 139). So, the translations, “often simply carried over the constructions of the language they were translating from verbatim into Chinese” (Kubler 1985, p. 26). These reasons account at least in part for the prevalence of Anglicised language in translated Chinese, which impacted greatly on modern written Chinese.

4.3 Previous Research on Anglicisms in MWC

Modern written Chinese adopted considerable hybrid features in the long process of Anglicisation. The following section will present a brief review of the research on Anglicisms in MWC.

4.3.1 Anglicisation

Anglicisation refers to the process in which the English language has exerted influence upon other languages and transformed them according to the linguistic rules of English (Kachru 1994; Tam 2009, p. vii). The terms used to describe this process, i.e., Europeanization, Englishization, Anglicisation, and Westernization are used interchangeably in the research literature to “denote the same process of influence of Western languages, mainly English, on Chinese” (Hsu 1994, p. 167). Anglicisation was initiated by the translation of Western works, mainly from English, into Chinese, and Gottlieb (Gottlieb 2005) defines an “Anglicism” as “any individual or systemic language feature adapted or adopted from English, or inspired or boosted by English models, used in intralingual communication in a language other than English”, and thinks of “translations as conveyors of Anglicisms” (Gottlieb 2005, p. 163).

“Although no empirical studies have yet tested the relative importance of translations in the Anglification of languages”, Gottlieb argues that “there is no doubt that translations—not least those found in the popular media—constitute a driving force in what certain critics have seen as the corruption of domestic languages” (p. 176).

The next section will explore Anglicised Chinese from the particular perspective of grammarians.

4.3.2 Anglicised Chinese in the Eyes of Grammarians

In China, Prof. Wang Li was the first scholar to undertake a systematic research project on what he called ‘Europeanization’. As a grammarian, Wang investigated ‘Europeanized grammar’ in two books entitled ‘Zhōngguó Xiàndài Yǔfǎ’ (中国现代语法 A Modern Chinese Grammar, first published in 1944) and ‘ZhōngguóYǔfǎ Lǐlùn’ (中国语法理论 Principles of Chinese Grammar, first published in 1945). The two books grew out of a series of lectures in the year of 1938 for the students at National Southwestern Associated University (Wang 1984, p. 2).

Wang discussed some types of Anglicisms in Chinese translated from English; they included lexical Anglicism, prevalence of disyllabic words, addition of subjects and copula in the sentences, ‘kěnéngshì’ (sentence patterns for possibility), ‘bèidòngshì’ (passive sentence), ‘jìhào’ (plural forms for nouns, adjective markers, verb markers, etc.), new ways of marking cohesion and coherence with conjunctions and prepositions, new pronouns and new terms for weights and measures, abbreviation and omission, reversed sentence patterns, quotation patterns, etc. (Wang 1984, 1985). Some of these linguistic features existed in classic Chinese, but the translations from English and other European languages made these language phenomena more prevalent in modern written Chinese.

These two books have been described as “the most comprehensive and substantial analysis of Europeanized Chinese constructions” and his approach is “descriptive, analytical, synchronic as well as diachronic,” with all the examples for the original Chinese taken from ‘Hōnglóumèng’ (红楼梦 Dream of Red Mansions) which was written in the “Beijing dialect during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and entirely innocent of foreign language grammatical influence” (Guo 2005, p. 22).

Wang’s observations were in general insightful and interesting except that in some places, rather than dealing squarely with the process of Westernization, Wang lapsed into a discussion of the principles of translating Western text into Chinese. Wang himself realized this and excused these lapses on the ground that the process of Westernization originated with the translation of Western text; hence it is difficult to separate the two. “As most of the Westernization process has come from English, the topic is restricted essentially to Anglicisation” (Tsao 1978, p. 41).

Beijing Shifan Xueyuan Zhongwenxi Hanyu Jiaoyanzu (The teaching and research group of Chinese at the Department of Chinese, Beijing Normal University) (1959) introduced the development of Chinese vocabulary and grammar and offered a detailed analysis of some Europeanized features in Chinese that have become popular since the May Fourth Movement, 1919. Through creating new words, or neologisms, and by adopting words from non-northern Mandarin dialects, classic Chinese and foreign languages (especially the European languages), Chinese vocabulary was enriched and greatly enlarged. The book lists some affixes that developed through the influence of European languages, such as the suffixes (−hua化, −shi式, −xing 性, −jie 界, −yuan 员, −jia 家, −xue 学, −l ü率, −yan 炎, −li 力,-fa 法, −dian 点, −guan 观, −lun 论) (ibid., 1959, pp. 107–113).

Li (1962) also usefully discussed innovative features in Chinese grammatical usage from 1949 to 1959; he observed the development in word-composition (such as increase in simple dissyllabic words and compounds, affixation, monosyllabic words for slogans, the use of antithetical expressions and abbreviations) and new grammatical forms.

New hybrid features increased over time. Chen (1993) introduced some new features in MWC imported from European languages to “meet the demand for new terms in the fast-growing fields of humanities, social sciences, and modern science and technology” (Chen 1993, p. 513). Xiang (1993) and Diao (2006) investigated a number of recent Europeanized grammatical norms in modern written Chinese, though their discussion is brief. He’s (2008) research investigates Europeanization in modern written Chinese (MWC) in greater detail, focusing on the frequency and ratio of the language items in Europeanized Chinese compared to original Chinese. However, the two basic statistical methods he uses can not shed much light on the reasons for language variations in modern written Chinese, for the findings are affected by the arbitrary nature of the data chosen for his research.

Some research such as that of Tsao, (1978), Kubler (1985), and Xie (1990), has paid more attention to the Chinese written in specific regions, especially Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The Taiwanese scholar Tsao, (1978) discusses the Anglicisation of Chinese morphology and syntax in the past two hundred years with examples taken from newspaper and fictional prose. He provided revealing evidence and insightful discussions on the impact of English on Chinese, though the discussion is limited owing to the restriction of genre and domain imposed by having a small data set of newspaper texts and one novel.

Hong Kong was a British colony (1841–1997) and has been a special administrative region of China since July 1st, 1997. During the British colonial era, English was the sole official language from 1883 to 1974. In 1990, the Hong Kong Basic Law declared English’s co-official language status with Chinese after the 1997 handover. English understandably exerted considerable local impact on Hong Kong Chinese. Xie’s (1990) monograph discusses Europeanized Chinese in Hong Kong and offers a detailed description of a number of Europeanized phenomena. But all his analyses of Europeanized phenomena were based on examples picked up from different genres and his sampling process was arbitrary.

Other researchers argue that Hong Kong Chinese is a synthesis of social, regional and functional varieties with multi-orientational influence from Cantonese, English and classical Chinese, and it is regarded as a transitional written interlingua (cf. Shi and Shao 2006; Shi and Wang 2006; Shi and Zhu 1999, 2000, 2005; Shi et al. 2001, 2003, 2006; etc.).

Anglicisation was initiated by the translation from English into Chinese, and the Anglicised features in Chinese are in evidence at different levels, particularly at the lexical and grammatical levels. Anglicised Chinese became an unavoidable phenomenon in the process of Chinese language development.

4.3.3 Anglicised Chinese in the Eyes of Sinologists

Many Sinologists, too, have naturally been interested in Anglicised Chinese.

Kubler (1985) investigated questions such as whether indirect language contact can exert extensive influence on one language, especially on the spoken language when compared with direct language contact. The actual features that Kubler’s (1985) study discussed were included within the scope of Wang’s (1984) books and so did not provide new findings about Europeanized grammar in written Chinese. Restricted in data, it focused on just two versions of the same book named ‘Jia’ (家family) written by Ba Jin (1904–2005), a famous writer in China.

Gunn (1991) discusses the changes in written Chinese during the twentieth century. He focuses on style and innovation in Chinese prose at the levels of grammar and rhetoric, cohesion and coherence. He explores the formal conventions of style with a social history in which “a Chinese educated elite following what they perceived as the example of foreign nations in creating a national language, […] debated the nature and role of that language in writing as part of a nation-building enterprise” (Gunn 1991, p. 1). It also “provides examples of innovations in grammatical constructions, rhetorical inventions, and sentence cohesion” for twentieth-century written Chinese. The hybrid features adopted from European languages, mainly from English are included in the list of innovations.

Prof. Masini from Italy explored the formation of the modern Chinese lexicon and its evolution toward a national language in the period from 1840 to 1898 (Masini, tr. by Huang, 1997). His book discusses the contact with West and how its influence on the Chinese lexicon led positively to the birth of a new national language. He also observed the loans to and from Japanese (Masini, tr. by Huang, 1997). It has been claimed that greatest contribution of this book “lies in the comprehensive list of new words formed under Western influence compiled by the author, which will provide a basis for future comparative studies”, and which “provides a foundation for future historical linguistic studies as well as lexicon-driven studies of historical and social changes” (Huang 1996, pp. 230, 231).

Other studies are more cautious about the impact of European languages on Chinese. Prof. Alain Peyraube, another Sinologist from France, turned his attention to hybridised and Westernized Chinese (Peyraube 2000). Peyraube (2000) carried out a chronological study which empirically demonstrates that, in the Chinese language, there are more than 10 kinds of assumed Europeanized grammatical phenomena that were frequently attested before its encounter with Western languages, mainly through translation, which is believed to have exerted its influence from the second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, “regarding the problem of actuation (origin of the forms), it is suggested that any influence of Western languages on Chinese grammar has been quite limited”. However, Peyraube also admitted that “such an influence could have been important, at least in some registers of language, for the implementation (spreading) of the so-called Western structures” (Peyraube 2000, p. 1).

Peyraube argued that, “the study of [the] Europeanization of Chinese interrogates a wide range of Europeanized structures in a discrete and piecemeal manner without sufficient empirical observation and evidence as to the conditions and timing under which the Europeanization process occurred” (Chan 2011, p. 39), and most of the research shared a common weakness in that “no systemic comparison of the language from the pre-contact period with that of the post-contact one has been made” (Peyraube 2000, p. 2).

The following section will review some current research on Anglicised Chinese that draws more systematically on corpus evidence.

4.4 Current Research on Anglicised Chinese with Corpus Data

Most of the previous research on hybridised and Anglicised Chinese have been based on personal experience and introspection. The development of corpus linguistics and the availability of electronic corpora make research on Anglicised Chinese more data-based and objective than was previously possible.

Hsu (1994) discusses the morphology and syntax of Anglicised Chinese with small corpus data (namely, full coverage of two days’ issues of the newspaper Central Daily News on Oct. 11, 1989 and Jan. 16, 1990, and thirty minutes of coverage of radio news from the Broadcast Corporation of China on Dec.7, 1990) (Hsu 1994, p. 169). It can be regarded as a tentative start to research on Anglicised Chinese with the help of corpus data.

More recent research on Anglicisation has drawn more extensively on corpus-based approaches. Ma’s (2010) thesis investigates the course of Europeanization of Chinese, focusing on the grammatical structure of ‘Pronoun + De’ developing into ‘Pd + Zirentong noun’, ‘Pd + untransferred noun’ and ‘Pd + verb/adjective’.

She considers that the current wave of Anglicism in Chinese is different from that of the May Fourth Period for specific reasons. The major method for language contact between Chinese and English was realized indirectly by translation during the May Fourth Period, but now it has developed from being only indirect to being both direct and indirect. Direct communication between English native speakers and Chinese people has become more and more common in modern times. The impact of the English language on Chinese has limited to written Chinese around the May Fourth Period, but it has since extended to face to face communication, with more and more people in China now being able to speak English. The Anglicised constructions which existed in written Chinese in the past now appear in spoken Chinese.

Ma’s dissertation is innovative in that it addresses both spoken and written Chinese, and it presents some findings on a number of Anglicised constructions hitherto neglected by the academic world. The conclusions not only “richen and deepen our understanding of the historical evolution of Chinese grammar and rhetoric, but they also have a value for teaching Chinese as a second language” (Ma 2010, p. IV).

Shen’s (2011) review offers a long list of Europeanized language features in modern Chinese (Shen 2011, pp. 145–146). Actually, the list can be lengthened with new items adopted from translated Chinese with English and other western languages as the source languages, for Europeanization occurred at all language levels including phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discursive.

All the previous research indicates features of Anglicised Chinese. The items included in the following table (see Table 4.1) represent the Anglicised features in modern written Chinese since May Fourth Movement:

Table 4.1 Anglicised features in Chinese
Full size table

The prevalence of these language features in translated Chinese texts can be identified by comparing them to non-translated Chinese texts, and the comparable Chinese corpus can help the researchers carry out the identifying processes. The reasons for the hybrid features in translated Chinese can not be found out without the support of a parallel corpus. The author of the present research has elsewhere reviewed the impact of the source language on Anglicised Chinese using an English and Chinese parallel corpus, and he argues that the features of translated Chinese have the potential to be absorbed into the linguistic system of non-translated Chinese over time (Dai 2013b).

4.5 Powerful Hybridity: Impact of Anglicisation on Chinese Language Development

It can be argued that the Anglicised translated Chinese has exerted a great influence on the general development of the Chinese language. Many researchers have offered their positive comments on the impact of Anglicised translation on Chinese. To take an example, one noted Marxist literary critic of the early twentieth century, Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) appeals to translation in order to improve what he sees as the “deficient” Chinese language,

Translation—in addition to introducing the content of the original to Chinese readers—has another important function, that is, helping us create a new modern Chinese language […] there is an almost complete absence of all those adjectives, verbs and prepositions that express subtle differences and complex relationships. […] Translation can indeed help us create new words, new sentence structures, a rich vocabulary, and subtle, precise and correct ways of expressing ourselves (Qu, 1931/1984, p. 266; translated into English by Yau Wai Ping, in Chan 2004, pp. 153–154).

Wang Guowei (1877–1929), another scholar of the same era, was the first to propose the concept of “new academic words” in China, and he strongly advocated the introduction of Western academic terms to meet the needs of social development. The language of the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) cannot express the ideas imported from Western culture, so there is a need for new concepts to be expressed by “new academic words” (Wang 1997, p. 41;Wang 2006).

It is therefore no wonder that Pym (2008) argues that “translation was often used as a way of developing the target language, actively using interference to impose new lexical items and syntactic structures on the receiver” (Pym 2008, p. 324).

Morphology, the study of the formal structure of words, and syntax, or the methods employed in combining morphemes and words into larger grammatical units, are the two main aspects of grammatical form. Europeanized structures have enriched and given new morphological and syntactic features to Chinese. This enrichment also happened in the areas of stylistics, rhetoric (rhetorical inventions), discourse and pragmatics (sentence cohesion).

Many drastic changes have taken place in Chinese since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it has been suggested that borrowing from Western languages, through translations, might have had a significant influence on the development of Chinese language. According to Peyraube’s (2000) investigation, translations from European languages have played an important role in constructing new ways of thinking among the intellectuals since the late nineteenth century (Peyraube 2000, p. 14). This is another important issue which is beyond the scope of the present research.

4.6 Conclusions

This chapter has offered a brief review of the hybridity of Anglicised Chinese, particularly since the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Some major research on Anglicised Chinese was reviewed briefly. Wang (1984), as the first systematic researcher on Anglicised Chinese, offered a long list of the language features for detailed descriptions and this greatly influenced following research. Many successive researchers have supplemented and enhanced Wang’s list with further suggested features. Some research focusing on Hong Kong and Taiwan, have also shed new light on particular varieties of Anglicised Chinese, and Sinologists’ research on the topic has also been reviewed in the chapter. It also reviewed the previous studies on hybridity in Anglicised Chinese with some comparable corpus data.

The following chapters offer a corpus analysis framework for describing the hybridity features in translated Chinese, drawing the parallel and comparable corpora data from different registers, with qualitative and quantitative approaches from diachronic and synchronic perspectives.