In pursuit of the ‘third code’
Using the ZJU Corpus of Translational Chinese (ZCTC)
in Translation Studies
Richard XiaoLianzhen He
Ming Yue
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CBTS: A new paradigm
• Laviosa (1998a)– “the corpus-based approach is evolving, through theoretical
elaboration and empirical realisation, into a coherent, composite and rich paradigm that addresses a variety of issues pertaining to theory, description, and the practice of translation.”
• Hypotheses that translation universals can be tested by corpus data (Baker 1993, 1995)
• Rapid development of corpus linguistics, esp. multilingual corpus research in the early 1990s
• Increasing interest in Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995)
• Tymoczko (1998)– “Corpus Translation Studies is central to the way that Translation
Studies as a discipline will remain vital and move forward.”• Meta 43/4 (1998); Kenny (2001); Laviosa (2002); Granger et al
(eds.) (2003); Olohan (2004); Mauranen et al (eds.) (2004); Kruger (ed.) (forthcoming)
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TU: A focus of CBTS• An important area of corpus-based TS over the
past decade– Baker (1993, 1996); Chesterman (2004); Kenny
(1998, 1999, 2000, 2001); Laviosa (1998b); Mauranen & Kujamaki 2004); McEnery & Xiao (2002, 2007); Olohan (2004); Olohan & Baker’s (2000); Øverås (1998); Pym (2005); Xiao and Yue (2008)
• The Translational English Corpus (TEC)– Manual
• http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/ctis/research/english-corpus/
– Software• http://ronaldo.cs.tcd.ie/tec/jnlp/
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Features of translated English
• Laviosa (1998b): Four core patterns of lexical use– A relatively low proportion of lexical words
over function words– A relatively high proportion of high-frequency
words over low-frequency words– A relatively great repetition of the most
frequent words– Less variety in most frequently used words
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Features of translated English• Beyond the lexical level
– Simplification: simpler than native language lexically / syntactically / stylistically
• “the tendency to simplify the language used in translation” (Baker 1996: 181-182)
– Normalization: more “normal” than the target native language• the “tendency to exaggerate features of the target language and to
conform to its typical patterns” (Baker 1996: 183)
– Explicitation: more frequent use of conjunctions, increased cohesion in translated text
• the tendency in translations to “spell things out rather than leave them implicit” (Baker 1996: 180)
– Sanitization: reduced connotational meaning• translated texts are “somewhat ‘sanitized’ versions of the original”
(Kenny 1998: 515)
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TU: A target of debate
• Is translational language different from target native language?– Translational language is at best an
unrepresentative special variant of the target language because translations cannot possibly avoid the effect of translationese
• e.g. Baker 1993; Gellerstam 1996; Hartmann 1985; Laviosa 1997; McEnery & Wilson 2001; McEnery & Xiao (2002, 2007); Teubert 1996
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TU: A target of debate
• Are the features uncovered on the basis of translational English generalizable to other translated languages?– Existing evidence has largely come from translational
English and related European languages– If such features are to be generalized as “translation
universals”, the language pairs involved must not be restricted to English and closely related languages
• Cheong’s (2006) study of English-Korean translation contradicts even the least controversial explicitation hypothesis
– Evidence from “genetically” distinct language pairs such as English and Chinese is undoubtedly more convincing, if not indispensable
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The ZCTC corpus
• Created with the explicit aim of studying the features of translated Chinese
• A translational counterpart of the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC), a one-million-word balanced corpus of native Chinese (McEnery & Xiao 2004)– www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/corplang/lcmc/
• Five hundred 2,000-word text samples taken proportionally from fifteen written text categories published in China in the 1990s– www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/corplang/ZCTC/
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LCMC / ZCTC corpus design
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ZCTC vs. LCMC
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Corpus markup and annotation
• CES-compliant XML– CES: www.cs.vassar.edu/CES/
• Tokenization and POS tagging– ICTCLAS2008: www.ictclas.org
• A precision rate of 98.54% for tokenization
• Paragraph, sentence, word token
• Encoded in Unicode (UTF-8)
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Core patterns of lexical use
• Do the core patterns of lexical use Laviosa (1998b) observes in translational English also apply in translated Chinese?
• Same criteria and parameters as in Laviosa (1998b)– Lexical density– Frequency profiles– Mean sentence length
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Lexical density
• The Stubbs-style lexical density: the ratio between the number of lexical words (i.e. content words) and the total number of words (Stubbs 1986: 33; 1996: 172)– Measure of informational load– Adopted in Laviosa (1998b)
• Lexical density measure by TTR or Standardized TTR (Scott 2004)– Measure of lexical variability– Commonly used in Corpus Linguistics
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Stubbs-style lexical density
• Mean LD: LCMC (66.93%) vs. ZCTC (61.59%) – the mean difference is statistically significant (t = -4.94, p<0.001)
• All 15 genres have a greater lexical density in native than translated Chinese – significant for all genres barring M
0.0010.0020.0030.0040.0050.0060.0070.0080.00
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Mea
n
Genre
Lex
ical
den
sity
LCMC ZCTC
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Standardized TTR
• LCMC as a whole has a slightly higher STTR than ZCTC (46.58 vs. 45.73) – not significant
• The differences in most genres are marginal• Greater STTR scores can be found in both native and translated
Chinese genres
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Mea
n
Genre
Sta
nd
ard
sied
TT
R
ZCTC LCMC
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Lexical-function word ratio
• The mean ratio between lexical and function words is significantly greater in native Chinese (2.08) than translated Chinese (1.64) (t = -4.88, p<0.001)
• Native Chinese has a greater ratio in all genres, and the differences are statistically significant for all genres barring M (science fiction)
• In line with Laviosa’s (1998b) initial hypothesis that translational language has a relatively low proportion of lexical words over function words
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Mea
n
Genre
Lex
ical
-fu
nct
ion
wo
rd r
atio
ZCTC LCMC
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Frequency profiles
• Laviosa’s (1998b) ‘list head’ or ‘high frequency words’– Wordlist items which individually account for
at least 0.10% of the total tokens in a corpus
• The same criterion for high frequency words in the present study to ensure comparability
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Frequency profiles
• The numbers of high frequency words are very similar in the two corpora• High frequency words account for a considerably greater proportion of
tokens in the translational corpus• High frequency words display a much greater repetition rate in translational
Chinese• The ratio between high- and low-frequency words is also greater in
translational corpus
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Mean sentence length vs. simplification
• Conflicting observations of mean sentence length as an indicator of simplification (e.g. Laviosa 1998b vs. Malmkjaer 1997)
• In our corpora, native Chinese shows a slightly greater mean sentence length (t = - 1.41, p = 0.17)
• Mean sentence length appears to be more sensitive to genres than being a reliable indicator of native versus translational language
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Mea
n
Genre
Mea
n s
ente
nce
len
gth
ZCTC LCMC
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Lexical use in translational Chinese
• Summary– The core lexical features proposed by Laviosa
(1998b) for translational English are essentially also applicable in translated Chinese
– But mean sentence length is less reliable as an indicator of simplification in translational Chinese
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Connectives: Device for explicitation?
• Perhaps the most studied topic in TU research and the least controversial hypothesis
• Chen (2006)– Connectives are a device for explicitation in English-
Chinese translation of popular science books• Xiao and Yue (2008)
– Connectives are significantly more frequent in translated than native Chinese fiction
• Question– Can we generalize this finding from specific genres to
Mandarin Chinese in general?
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Conjunctions in ZCTC and LCMC
• Mean frequency of conjunctions is significantly greater in ZCTC (306.42 instances per 10,000 tokens) than in LCMC (243.23) (LL=723.12 for 1 d.f., p<0.001)
• Genres of imaginative writing (K-P, R) generally demonstrate a significantly more frequent use of conjunctions in translational Chinese
• Of expository writing, while conjunctions are considerably more frequent in most genres in translated Chinese (e.g. A, H), there are also genres in which conjunctions are more common in native Chinese (e.g. F, J)
0
100
200
300
400
500
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Mea
n
Genre
Fre
qu
ency
per
10,
000
wo
rds
ZCTC LCMC
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Conjunctions of different frequency bands
• More types of conjunctions of high frequency bands (0.10%, 0.05%, and 0.01%) are used in translational corpus
• There are an equal number of conjunctions (56 types) with a proportion greater than 0.005% in translational and native corpora
• After this balance point, the native corpus displays a greater number of less frequent conjunctions (a usage band of 0.001% and below)
• The tendency to use conjunctions more frequently can be taken as a sign of explicitation
0
50
100
150
200
0.1%
+
0.05
%+
0.01
%+
0.00
5%+
0.00
1%+
0.00
05%
+
0.00
01%
+ All
Usage bands
Fre
qu
en
cy
ZCTC LCMC
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Conjunctions of different styles
• A closer comparison of the lists of frequent conjunctions (proportion of 0.001%) in their respective corpus also sheds some new light on the simplification hypothesis– There are 91 and 99 types of frequent conjunctions in
the two corpora – 86 items overlap in the two lists– Conjunctions on the ZCTC but not LCMC list are all
informal, colloquial, and simple, which usually have more formal alternatives
– Conjunctions on the LCMC but not ZCTC list are typically formal and archaic
• Evidence for the simplification hypothesis but against the normalization hypothesis
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Conclusions
• Laviosa’s (1998b) observations of the core patterns of lexical features of translational English are also applicable in translated Chinese
• Beyond the lexical level– Mean sentence length is sensitive to genres and may
not be a reliable indicator of simplification– A comparison of frequent connectives in native and
translational Chinese appears to suggest that simpler forms tend to be used in translations
– In spite of some genre-based subtleties, translational Chinese uses conjunctions more frequently than native Chinese, which provides evidence in favour of the explicitation hypothesis
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Conclusions• We believe that the newly created ZCTC
will play a leading role in the study of translational Chinese by producing more empirical evidence
• It is our hope that the study of translational Chinese will help to address limitations of imbalance in the current state of translation universal research