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Article published In: Target
Vol. 32:3 (2020) ► pp.420–455

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Language contact through translation

The influence of explicitness in English–Chinese translation on language change in vernacular Chinese

 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University
 | Beijing Foreign Studies University
Published online: 21 May 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.19001.pan
Abstract
This article investigates the role of translations from English in language change in Chinese. It employs a new corpus, the Chinese Diachronic Composite Corpus (CDCC), which incorporates a parallel corpus and comparable corpus in three sampling periods in the twentieth century, and a refe­rence corpus as a starting point in the timeframe. We examine whether explicitness in English–Chinese translations has exerted an impact on the target language, focusing on adversative conjunctions as a measure of explicitness. The results of the study demonstrate that: (1) translated Chinese texts have changed in step with original Chinese texts in the frequency of adversative conjunctions; (2) translated Chinese texts and original Chinese texts are interrelated throughout the three periods, but the correlation between them has changed perceptibly over the three sample points; and (3) source language interference found in translated Chinese texts increases over the three periods.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language contact through translation
  • 3.Contrastive differences between English and Chinese in the usage patterns of adversative conjunctions
  • 4.Corpus design and methodology
    • 4.1Composition of the CDCC
    • 4.2Data collection and processing
      • 4.2.1Adversative conjunctions as a focus for analysis
      • 4.2.2Procedures for analysis
    • 4.3Statistical analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Analysis of the parallel corpus
    • 5.2Analysis of the comparable corpus
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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