Language contact through translation: The influence of explicitness in English–Chinese translation on language change in vernacular Chinese

Shuangzi Pang and Kefei Wang
Shanghai Jiao Tong University | Beijing Foreign Studies University

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.

Publication history

Date received: 30 December 2018

Date accepted: 31 March 2020

Published online: 21 May 2020

Table of contents

Translation has played a significant role in the history of languages, just as it has in the histories of ideas and cultures. Not only do translations show interference from source languages, but translation also exerts an impact on target texts and languages.

Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price. Direct PDF access to this article can be purchased through our e-platform.

References

Amouzadeh, Mohammad, and Juliane House
2010 “Translation as a Language Contact Phenomenon: The Case of English and Persian Passives.” Languages in Contrast 10 (1): 54–75. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald
2008 Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Mona
1993 “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications.” In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, edited by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233–252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1996 “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: The Challenges that Lie Ahead.” In Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, edited by Harold Somers, 175–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baumgarten, Nicole
2007 “Converging Conventions? Macrosyntactic Conjunction with English and and German und .” Text & Talk 27: 139–170. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Becher, Viktor
2009 “The Decline of Damit in English–German Translations: A Diachronic Perspective on Source Language Interference.” SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpreting 4 (1): 2–24.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011 Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation: A Corpus-Based Study of English–German and German–English Translations of Business Texts. PhD diss. Hamburg University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beijing Library
1986 中国现代作家著译书目 [Bibliography of Translated Works by Modern Chinese Writers]. Beijing: Catalogs and Documentations Publishing House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1987 民国时期总书目 [General Bibliography in the Period of the Republic of China]. Beijing: Catalogs and Documentations Publishing House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bennett, Karen
2010 “Academic Discourse in Portugal: A Whole Different Ball Game?” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (1): 21–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas
2003 “Compressed Noun-phrase Structures in Newspaper Discourse: The Competing Demands of Popularization vs. Economy.” In New Media Language, edited by Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis, 169–181. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan
1989 “Drift and the Evolution of English Style: A History of Three Genres.” Language 65 (3): 487–517. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bisang, Walter
2009 “On the Evolution of Complexity: Sometimes Less is More in East and Mainland Southeast Asia.” In Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable, edited by Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil, and Peter Trudgill, 34–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2015 “Hidden Complexity – The Neglected Side of Complexity and Its Implications.” Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences 1 (1): 1–13. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bisiada, Mario
2013 From Hypotaxis to Parataxis: An Investigation of English-German Syntactic Convergence in Translation. PhD diss. University of Manchester.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blake, Norman Francis
1992 “Translation and the History of English.” In History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, edited by Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen, 3–24. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blühdorn, Hardarik
2010 “A Semantic Typology of Sentence Connectives.” In 40 Jahre Partikelforschung (Stauffenburg Linguistik 55), edited by Theo Harden and Elke Hentschel, 215–231. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1986 “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” In Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, edited by Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 17–35. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Braunmüller, Kurt, and Juliane House
2009 Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, Wallace
2004 “Investigating Explicitation of Conjunctions in Translated Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study.” Language Matters 35 (1): 295–312. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cohen, Imogen
2018 “On Randomness.” Target 30 (1): 3–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cordes, Ruth
2014 Language Change in 20th Century Written Chinese: The Claim for Europeanization. PhD diss. University of Hamburg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dai, Guangrong
2016 Hybridity in Translated Chinese: A Corpus Analytical Framework. Singapore: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dayrell, Carmen
2005 Investigating Lexical Patterning in Translated Brazilian Portuguese: A Corpus-Based Study. PhD diss. University of Manchester.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dyvik, Helge
1998 “A Translational Basis for Semantics.” In Corpora and Crosslinguistic Research: Theory, Method, and Case Studies, edited by Stig Johansson and Signe Oksefjell, 51–86. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ehlich, Konrad
1984 “Zum Textbegriff.” In Text-Textsorten-Semantik: Linguistische Modelle und Maschinelle Verfahren, edited by Annely Rothkegel and Babara Sandig, 9–25. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Henrik
1999 “The Impact of English: Danish TV Subtitles as Mediators of Anglicisms.” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47: 133–153.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.
2009 Statistics for Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th., and Martin Hilpert
2010 “Modeling Diachronic Change in the Third Person Singular: A Multifactorial, Verb- and Author-specific Exploratory Approach.” English Language and Linguistics 14 (3): 293–320. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guo, Hongjie
2005 英语对现代汉语的影响：语言认知研究法 [The Influence of English on Modern Chinese: A Cognitive Research]. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., and Christian Matthiessen
2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner
2007 “Cohesive Explicitness and Explicitation in an English–German Translation Corpus.” Languages in Contrast 7 (2): 241–265. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva
2005 Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H., and Kenneth C. Hill
1980 “Mixed Grammar, Purist Grammar, and Language Attitudes in Modern Nahuatl.” Language in Society 9 (3): 321–348. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
House, Juliane
2001 “Translation Quality Assessment: Linguistic Description versus Social Evaluation.” Meta 46 (2): 243–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010 “Using Translation and Parallel Text Corpora to Investigate the Influence of Global English on Textual Norms in Other Languages.” In Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Research and Applications, edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach, and Jeremy Munday, 187–208. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2016 Translation as Communication across Languages and Cultures. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hu, Kaibao
2005 “论英汉词典历史文本对汉语现代化进程的影响” [On the Impact of the Historical Text of English-Chinese Dictionary on the Modernization of the Chinese Language]. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching 37 (3): 57–60.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johanson, Lars
2002 Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. London: Curzon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Junge, Svenja
2011 “Corporate Rhetoric in English and Japanese Business Repots.” In Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 207–232. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kamenická, Renata
2007 “Explicitation Profile and Translator Style.” In Translation Research Projects 1, edited by Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko, 117–130. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klaudy, Kinga, and Krisztina Károly
2005 “Implicitation in Translation: Empirical Evidence for Operational Asymmetry in Translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 6 (1): 13–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja, Viktor Becher, and Steffen Höder
2011 “A Tentative Typology of Translation-induced Language Change.” In Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 9–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja, Juliane House, and Viktor Becher
2012 “Changing Conventions in English–German Translations of Popular Scientific Texts.” In Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies, edited by Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel, 315–334. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja
2014 “Translation as a Locus of Language Contact.” In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Juliane House, 96–115. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krüger, Ralph
2016 “The Textual Degree of Technicality as a Potential Factor Influencing the Occurrence of Explicitation in Scientific and Technical Translation.” The Journal of Specialized Translation 26: 96–115.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kruger, Haidee, and Bertus van Rooy
2016 “Constrained Language: A Multidimensional Analysis of Translated English and a Non-native Indigenised Variety of English.” English World-Wide 37 (1): 26–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
1977 “Syntactic Reanalysis.” In Mechanisms of Syntactic Change, edited by Charles N. Li, 57–139. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laviosa-Braithwaite, Sara
1998 “Universals of Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 288–291. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicolas Smith
2009 Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
2000 Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, Jinxi
1924/2007 新著国语文法 [A New Grammar of the Chinese National Language]. Changsha: Hunan Education Publishing House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lian, Shuneng
2006 英译汉教程 [A Textbook for English–Chinese Translation]. Beijing: Higher Education Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lv, Shuxiang
1942/1982 中国文法要略 [Essentials of Chinese Grammar]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Malamatidou, Sofia
2013 Translation and Language Change with Reference to Popular Science Articles: The Interplay of Diachronic and Synchronic Corpus-Based Studies. PhD diss. University of Manchester.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2017a “Creativity in Translation through the Lens of Language Contact: A Multilingual Corpus of a Clockwork Orange.” The Translator 23 (3): 292–309. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2017b “Why Changes Go Unnoticed: The Role of Adaptation in Translation-induced Linguistic Change.” Lingua 200: 22–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018 Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martinet, André
1953/1974 “Preface.” In Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, edited by Uriel Weinreich, vii–ix. New York, NY: Linguistic Circle of New York.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matras, Yaron
2009 Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony, and Richard Xiao
2014 “Parallel and Comparable Corpora: What Is Happening?” In Incorporating Corpora: The Linguist and the Translator, edited by Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers, 18–31. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murtisari, Elisabet
2016 “Explicitation in Translation Studies: The Journey of an Elusive Concept.” Translation and Interpreting 8 (2): 64–81.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nida, Eugene
1964/2004 Toward a Science of Translating. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pander Maat, Henk, and Ted Sanders
2006 “Connectives in Texts.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Keith Brown, 33–41. London: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peyraube, Alain
2000 “Westernization of Chinese Grammar in the 20th Century: Myth or Reality?” Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 28 (1): 1–25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Probst, Julia
2009 Der Einfluss des Englischen auf das Deutsche: Zum Sprachlichen Ausdruck von Interpersonalität in Populärwissenschaftlichen Texten. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team
2018 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Accessed September 31, 2018. https://​www​.R​-project​.org/
Saldanha, Gabriela
2008 “Explicitation Revisited: Bringing the Reader into the Picture.” Trans-kom 1 (1): 20–35.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Santorini, Barbara
1990 Part-of-speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project. Technical report MS-CIS-90-47. University of Pennsylvania: Department of Computer and Information Science.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schleiermacher, Friedrich
1813/1973 “Methoden des Übersetzens.” In Das Problem des Übersetzens, edited by Hans Joachim Störig, 38–70. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shen, Jiaxuan
2017 《繁花》语言札记 [Language Notes about Flourishing Blossom]. Nanchang: 21st Century Publishing House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich
2008 “Empirical Studies of Translations as a Mode of Language Contact: ‘Explicitness’ of Lexicogrammatical Encoding as a Relevant Dimension.” In Language Contact and Contact Languages, edited by Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana, 317–345. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2012 “Methodological Cross-fertilization: Empirical Methodologies in (Computational) Linguistics and Translation Studies.” In Crossroads between Contrastive Linguistics, Translation Studies, and Machine Translation. Special issue of Translation: Corpora, Computation, Cognition 2 (1): 3–21.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
UNESCO
n.d. Index Translationum. Accessed July 30, 2018. http://​www​.unesco​.org​/xtrans/
Wang, Jianxin
2011 Contrastive Connectors in English and Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study. MA thesis, University of Auckland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Kefei
2002 “近代翻译对汉语的影响” [Influence of Modern Translation on Chinese]. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 34 (6): 458–463.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Li
1984 王力文集 [Collected Works of Wang Li]. Jinan: Shandong Educational Publishing House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2005 汉语语法史 [A History of Chinese Grammar]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Li and Shasha Yan
2016 “母语为英语的汉语学习者书面语逻辑连接词习得研究” [The Use of Chinese Logical Connectors by Native English Speakers]. Foreign Language and Translation 2016 (1): 69–76.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel
1953/1974 Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xie, Yaoji
1990 现代汉语欧化语法概论 [An Introduction to Europeanization of Chinese Grammar]. Hong Kong: Guang Ming Book Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xing, Fuyi
2001 汉语复句研究 [A Study of Chinese Complex Sentences]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xu, Jiajin, and Yunlong Jia
2011 Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) Qualitative Coder. Accessed March 12, 2020 http://​iresearch​.unipus​.cn​/info​/method​/keyangongju​_2​.html
Zhang, Huaping, and Qun Liu
2002 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Lexical Analysis System (ICTCLA). Accessed March 12, 2020. http://​sewm​.pku​.edu​.cn​/QA​/reference​/ICTCLAS​/FreeICTCLAS
Zhu, Dexi
1982/2011 语法讲义 [The Lectures on Chinese Grammar]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
 
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue