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

This book takes a corpus-based approach, which integrates translation studies and contrastive analysis, to the study of translational language. It presents the world’s first balanced corpus of translational Chinese, which, in combination with a comparable native Chinese corpus, provides a reliable empirical basis for a comprehensive account of the macro-statistic, lexical, and grammatical features of translational Chinese in English-to-Chinese translation – a significant contribution to Descriptive Translation Studies. The research findings based on these two distinctly different languages have important implications for universal translation research on the European tradition.

“This book by Xiao and Hu (2015) provides a much needed perspective and directs their efforts towards investigating the linguistic features of translational Chinese by probing into two genetically different languages, Chinese and English. The readers should be delighted to find that on the one hand … . the book is to date the most comprehensive study of translational Chinese adopting a corpus approach.” (Wenchao Su and Defeng Li, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31 (3), 2016) 

Richard Xiao is Lecturer of Chinese Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK) and Professor of Linguistics at Zhejiang University (China). His main research interests cover corpus linguistics, contrastive and translation studies of English and Chinese, and tense and aspect theory. He has published numerous books including Aspect in Mandarin Chinese (John Benjamins, 2004), Corpus-Based Language Studies (Routledge, 2006), A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (Routledge, 2009), Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), and Corpus-Based Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese (Routledge, 2010).