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Corpora have revolutionized nearly all areas of linguistic research over the past four decades (McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006; McEnery and Hardie 2012). Translation studies and contrastive linguistics are no exceptions. Indeed, the rapid development of bilingual parallel corpora as well as monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora since the early 1990s has been of particular relevance and crucial importance to translation studies and contrastive linguistics. This special issue of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory focuses on corpus-based translation and contrastive linguistic studies involving two genetically different languages, namely English and Chinese, which we believe have formed an important interface with its unique features as a result of the mutual interaction between the two languages. This introduction will first contextualize the special issue by exploring the state of the art in using corpora in translation and contrastive linguistic studies, particularly in the context of the two languages covered, and then provide a synopsis of each article included in this volume and comment on its significance and implications for linguistic theorization.

Corpus-based Translation Studies focuses on translation as a product by comparing comparable corpora of translated and non-translated texts. A number of distinctive features of translations have been posited including, for example, explicitation, simplification, normalisation, levelling out, source language interference, and under-representation of target language unique items. Nevertheless, research of this area has until recently been confined largely to translational English and closely related European languages. If the features of translational language that have been reported on the basis of these languages are to be generalised as “translation universals”, the language pairs involved must not be restricted to English and closely related European languages. Clearly, evidence from a genetically distant language pair such as English and Chinese is arguably more convincing, if not indispensable. This article explores, in the broad context of translation universal research, lexical and grammatical properties of translational Chinese on the basis of two one-million-word balanced comparable corpora of translated and non-translated native Chinese texts. The findings of this empirical study of the properties of translational Chinese have enabled a reevaluation, from the perspective of translational Chinese, of largely English-based translation universal hypotheses.

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.

Splittable Compounds (SCs henceforth) are a rather productive type of disyllabic verbal construction in Chinese, whose two morphological elements can be used together or separated by other interposing elements while the semantic integrity remains. The present study examines the English translations of SCs in a Chinese-English parallel corpus of five million Chinese characters and English words. The study takes a form-meaning combined approach to the structural and semantic differences or non-correspondences between SCs and their English translations. The non-correspondences of lexico-grammar and argument structure of SCs and their translations were thoroughly annotated and analysed. The predominant pattern revealed by our corpus investigation is that the English translations of SCs are characterised by semantic explicitation as well as structural explicitation. This is especially true in the English translations of non-split SCs. The split and non-split SCs are translated in different ways morpho-syntactically and semantically. The translations of non-split SCs more often involve rearrangements in argument structure, such as argument addition and semantic alternative, while the translations of split SCs are more likely to involve changes in grammatical properties. The reconfiguration of morpho-syntactic elements and semantic roles may well be explained from the typological differences of the two languages, the verb semantics, and the syntactic contexts of the SCs.

Semantic preference and semantic prosody have been explored extensively in both monolingual and contrastive linguistic contexts. However, few contrastive linguistic studies have been undertaken to look at the semantic preference and semantic prosody in a non-European language, such as Chinese, which is very different from English (with notable exceptions such as Tao 2003, and Xiao and McEnery 2006), still less addressing the complex relationships between semantic preference and prosody and cross-linguistic equivalence. The present study addresses important features of semantic preference and prosody across English and Chinese and examines their roles in achieving equivalence between corresponding lexical items of the two languages. We start with recurrent translation equivalents extracted from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Parallel Corpus and move on to observe the semantic preferential and prosodic profiles of translation pairs in two comparable corpora, namely, the Chinese National Corpus and the British National Corpus. Analyses show that semantic prosody is inseparably linked with patterns of co-selection, and a word may be associated with more than one semantic prosody, realized in more than one pattern of co-selection. By the same token, cross-linguistic equivalence resides only in corresponding patterns of words under study, not corresponding single words in the two languages. It suggests that semantic prosodic strength is a useful indicator of degrees of equivalence and non-equivalence whilst both semantic preference and semantic prosody impact equivalence and translatability. The study also shows that the relationship between syntax and semantic prosody in Chinese is rather different from that in English, suggesting that colligation in Chinese is much more complex, deserving a more rigorous definition. Finally, the article addresses practical implications for future semantic prosody studies, contrastive linguistic and translation studies and foreign language pedagogy.

This article aims to explore the diachronic change and synchronic variation of passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese by combining the variationist sociolinguistic approach and the comparative method of historical linguistics. In particular, this study contributes to the literature on cross-linguistic grammaticalization by illustrating how Mandarin bei passives have evolved diachronically with possible respect to English. Based on 3,414 tokens of passive constructions from three comparable corpora across two significant time periods in Chinese linguistic history, the findings of our study reveal that the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic constraints on the bei passive in modern Mandarin Chinese have changed significantly from the era in which there was no contact with English. The empirical methods used in our study (multivariate analysis and the quantitative comparison of various Chinese varieties) lend credence to our findings that change and variation of bei passives can be ascribed to the influence of English at least to a certain extent. Our results suggest that this cross-linguistic contact might have contributed to the grammaticalization of the morpheme bei as well as the process of passivization in Mandarin Chinese.