What is peculiar to translational Mandarin Chinese? A corpus-based study of Chinese constructions' load capacity
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Kefei Wang
Kefei Wang is Professor of Linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, where he also serves as the deputy director of the centre. His main research interests include corpus linguistics and translation studies. He has been a principal investigator of a number of national key projects including those that have produced China's major parallel corpora of English and Chinese. His recent books includeParallel Corpus: Construction and Application (Beijing, 2004) andExploring Corpus Translation Studies (Shanghai, 2011). He is currently the editor ofForeign Language Teaching and Research , the most prestigious journal of language and linguistics in China.
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Hongwu Qin
Hongwu Qin is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Qufu Normal University in China. His major research interests cover contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation theory. He is co-author (with Kefei Wang) ofContrastive and Translation Studies of English and Chinese (Beijing, 2010) and has published dozens of research papers in prestigious journals in China.
Abstract
It is generally held that the sentence length (hereafter S-Length) provides useful information about the reading level of a text. However, it does not work very well as an indicator in studying translational Mandarin Chinese. To improve reliability of the length measurement, this article seeks to give an alternative account from the perspective of the sentence segment length (henceforth SS-Length), which is closely correlated with the construction load capacity (CLC) to which Mandarin Chinese is sensitive. The study demonstrates that, as far as Mandarin Chinese is concerned, the SS-Length account is more revealing than the S-Length counterpart, because the former is more relevant to language use in Chinese. It is also found that CLC, which is related to the SS-Length, is one of the determinants that contribute to the readability of a Chinese text. Hence it should be a staple part in translation assessment and translator training.
About the authors
Kefei Wang is Professor of Linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, where he also serves as the deputy director of the centre. His main research interests include corpus linguistics and translation studies. He has been a principal investigator of a number of national key projects including those that have produced China's major parallel corpora of English and Chinese. His recent books include Parallel Corpus: Construction and Application (Beijing, 2004) and Exploring Corpus Translation Studies (Shanghai, 2011). He is currently the editor of Foreign Language Teaching and Research, the most prestigious journal of language and linguistics in China.
Hongwu Qin is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Qufu Normal University in China. His major research interests cover contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation theory. He is co-author (with Kefei Wang) of Contrastive and Translation Studies of English and Chinese (Beijing, 2010) and has published dozens of research papers in prestigious journals in China.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Translation and contrastive linguistic studies at the interface of English and Chinese: Significance and implications
- Lexical and grammatical properties of Translational Chinese: Translation universal hypotheses reevaluated from the Chinese perspective
- What is peculiar to translational Mandarin Chinese? A corpus-based study of Chinese constructions' load capacity
- Structural and semantic non-correspondences between Chinese splittable compounds and their English translations: A Chinese-English parallel corpus-based study
- Exploring semantic preference and semantic prosody across English and Chinese: Their roles for cross-linguistic equivalence
- A corpus-based variationist approach to bei passives in Mandarin Chinese
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Translation and contrastive linguistic studies at the interface of English and Chinese: Significance and implications
- Lexical and grammatical properties of Translational Chinese: Translation universal hypotheses reevaluated from the Chinese perspective
- What is peculiar to translational Mandarin Chinese? A corpus-based study of Chinese constructions' load capacity
- Structural and semantic non-correspondences between Chinese splittable compounds and their English translations: A Chinese-English parallel corpus-based study
- Exploring semantic preference and semantic prosody across English and Chinese: Their roles for cross-linguistic equivalence
- A corpus-based variationist approach to bei passives in Mandarin Chinese
