Corps de l’article

Looking back to at least 1993, Mona Baker (1993: 235) first envisaged corpus-based translation studies (CTS) and predicted that it would constitute a turning point in translation studies. Corpus-based translation and interpreting studies (CTIS) is now recognized as one of the major paradigms within the discipline of translation studies. It is within this context that the present volume, co-edited by Kaibao Hu (Professor at the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University) and Kyung Hye Kim (Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University), offers a welcome survey of CTIS in the Chinese context, providing an in-depth summary of the field’s development, and showcasing current trends and new orientations.

The book opens with a preface in which the editors express the desire that the volume will bring previously unknown Chinese scholarship to international, English-speaking audiences. This is followed by an introduction in which the editors summarize each of the contributions. The main body of the book is made up of four Parts covering: Corpus-based Research on Translational Chinese (Part I), Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (Part II), Corpus-based Research on Style and Equivalence (Part III), and Exploratory and Critical Approaches to Corpus-based Translation Studies (Part IV). Each Part contains two chapters. The volume ends with a useful index.

The first chapter in Part I is written by Wallace Chen and presents an overview of corpus‑based research on translational Chinese, dating the area back to the start of the millennium, when Liao (2000) first introduced the word yuliaoku (语料库, corpus) and CTS to Chinese translation studies. Chen reviews the development of both CTS and corpus‑based interpreting studies (CIS) in China, showing how the use of corpora made scholars question received wisdom in translation studies, and highlighting research on translation norms and translation universals. He also surveys the different kinds of corpora, such as general corpora, specialized corpora, and parallel corpora, that Chinese scholars have constructed for research and pedagogic applications, and stresses the current dynamism of the field. While not conceived as an introduction to the volume, Chen’s contribution does manage to set the scene for subsequent, more specific chapters.

The second chapter in this Part homes in on the role of translation in the evolution of Mandarin, showing how a corpus-based approach can help answer some long-standing questions. Hongwu Qin, Lei Kong and Ranran Chu argue that in the early decades of the twentieth century, a flurry of translation activity related to Europeanization coincided with the sudden and rapid change of original (that is, ‘non-translated’) Mandarin. Adopting a diachronic comparable corpus approach, the authors go on to investigate length and complexity in the constructions “Preposition+Locative,” “Numeral Classifer+NP” and “Demonstrative Classifer+NP” in a translational Mandarin corpus. Their findings challenge the hypothesis that translational Chinese imitated the structures of English original texts, and suggest instead that indirect contact between English and Chinese may have played a critical role in the evolution of modern Chinese. Modern Mandarin shows a strong tendency to overuse pre-modifying clauses and in particular syntactically heterogeneous modifiers, clausal attributives, embedded elements and multi-verb phrases, etc. (p. 51). Original Mandarin thus appears to have selectively copied the features of translated Chinese, rather than those of English.

Part II, on corpus-based interpreting studies, begins with a contribution by Binhua Wang and Fang Tang, in which the authors give an overview of the development of CIS in Chinese contexts, as seen through the prism of four major interpreting corpora built by Chinese scholars, and a review of some thirty journal articles based overwhelmingly on data extracted from these corpora. The four major corpora in question are: 1) the Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners-Spoken (PACCEL-S); 2) CECIC3.0, which is actually a grouping of two parallel corpora – one of which is based on press conferences interpreted from Chinese into English – and one comparable monolingual corpus made up of English-language press conferences; 3) the Chinese-English Interpreting Corpus Online (CEICO); and 4) the Bilingual Interpreting Corpus on Contemporary Social Life (BICCSL, Hong Kong). The authors’ subsequent literature review leads them to conclude that the topics most frequently discussed in CIS in China are lexical and syntactic features of interpreted texts, universals and norms in interpreting, and corpora in interpreter training. In addition, the authors consider future developments of CIS, asking, for example, how we might optimize the analytic tools of corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies, so that they can be better adapted to interpreting studies (p.78), and suggesting that explanations of results should go beyond frequency description to the tentative conceptualization of theories about interpreting (p. 80).

In the second chapter in Part II, Feng Pan investigates interpreters’ use of hedges in a parallel corpus of interpreted Chinese government press conferences (1990-2014), taking a parallel corpus of translations of Chinese government work reports as a reference, and applying translation norm theory to his results. The study reveals that hedges are used more frequently in interpreted texts than translated texts. Pan also finds that while hedges are used to facilitate interpersonal relationships (49.7% of cases) and enhance the precision of statements in interpreted texts (44.4% of cases), in translated texts, they are mainly used to enhance the precision of statements (91.7% of cases). Having surveyed the norms that can become manifest in interpreter behaviour, Pan concludes that the interpreters represented in his corpus, like the translators whose work he studies, prioritize faithfulness to the source text above all other considerations (p. 107). The norms of politeness and target-text accuracy are, however, also highly valued by interpreters. Pan’s impressive study contains one potentially obscure element, namely the use of ‘norm-taking’ in its title. It was not immediately clear to the current reviewers what the term meant, and ‘norm-prioritization’ might have been more transparent, as the chapter is concerned with which norms prevail in cases where there are potentially conflicting norms.

In the first chapter in Part III, Xiaohong Li and Naixing Wei explore the roles of semantic prosody and semantic preference in cross-language equivalence on the basis of a bi-directional English-Chinese parallel corpus: the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Parallel Corpus. Drawing on Sinclair’s extended units of meaning framework, the study follows a three-way division of semantic prosodies into positive, negative and neutral. Taking duoqu (夺取, seize), zhuzhang (助长, fuel) and pingxi (平息, assuage) as examples, the study analyzes their cross-language equivalences. The authors ultimately argue that each word “is habitually involved in more than one pattern; that each pattern is associated with a particular semantic prosody; and that cross-language equivalence resides in corresponding patterns of co-selection, rather than word-to-word equivalents” (p. 118). They also suggest that a change of pattern brings about a change of meaning and prosodic strength, which offers translators insights into how to select appropriate word patterns in the target language.

In the second chapter in this Part, Qing Wang and Defeng Li explore translators’ style in Chinese translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses. They design a parallel corpus and a comparable corpus, based on three subcorpora: the English original of Ulysses; Qian Xiao’s Chinese translation and Di Jin’s Chinese translation; and a comparable corpus consisting of Xiao’s Chinese translation and his Chinese writings, including a novel and 23 short stories. They point out that the translators’ style is manifested in the translated text, not only at the lexical level, but also at the syntactic level. At the lexical level, Xiao has a preference for colloquialism, verbs and emotional words in particular. His use of such dialectal verbs such as xiaode (晓得, know) and qiaojian (瞧见, see) is also a feature of his creative writing. At the syntactic level, both translators adopt post-positioned structures in translating English adverbial clauses, a notable influence of the structure of the source text. It is also suggested that in such cases, the translator’s ‘fingerprint’ can be attributed to the influence of both the source language and the translator’s mother tongue (p. 175). This chapter thus takes a slightly different approach to translator style than that taken by scholars who attempt to eliminate source-language influence as a variable in discussions of the topic (e.g. Saldanha 2011). For such scholars, corpus approaches can certainly detect instances of the source language ‘shining through’ (Teich 2003), but such instances are not attributed to the translator’s style.

Part IV of the volume begins with Tao Li’s investigation of the national image of China in Chinese translations of two South Korean news articles about the deployment in South Korea of the USA’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. Based on an analysis of collocates of zhongguo (中国, China) and zhongfang (中方, China’s side) in the coverage in Hankyoreh, the mainstream left-wing newspaper, and Chosun, the major right-wing newspaper, the study finds that these reports project China in different ways prior to and after THAAD deployment. In Hankyoreh, China is seen as a victim of THAAD deployment (p. 207). Collocates such as fandui (反对, oppose), mingan (敏感, sensitive), and jihui (忌讳, taboo) are identified in this source and interpreted as demonstrating China’s strong opposition to the deployment and its understanding of the deployment as a sensitive and even taboo subject (p. 198). Chosun, meanwhile, highlights China’s opposition to the deployment of THAAD, which is constructed as a rational response to the security situation on the Korean peninsula (p. 189, 210). The differences in attitude between the two sources are explained from the perspective of geopolitics, although the objective of pursuing the “national interest” dominates in both news reports. Overall, Li’s chapter provides a welcome, albeit very small-scale example of a corpus-based discourse-analytical study of translation into Chinese in an East Asian context.

The final chapter in the volume is contributed by one of the editors, Kaibao Hu, who discusses the prospect of convergence between CTS and translation cognition research (TCR) by examining their similarities and differences. CTS uses corpora of original and translated texts to investigate the nature of translation and features of the translation process. TCR attempts to reveal psychological mechanisms and cognitive regularities. The two fields share common ground, for example in the analysis of a large number of bilingual or translated texts, to generalize about features of translation and regularities in bilingual transfer, and to identify translators’ idiosyncrasies and factors relevant to the translation process. CTS provides research methodologies, TCR offers theoretical foundations, and the research areas of CTS and TCR complement each other, converge and give rise to a new field of translation studies, corpus-based translation cognition research (CTCR). Hu’s vision will no doubt find a receptive audience among those European scholars who are also currently attempting to find synergies between more cognitively-oriented translation process studies and CTS as part of a wider agenda to broaden the theoretical basis and statistical sophistication of CTS (see, especially, Hansen-Schirra et al. 2017; De Sutter and Lefer 2020).

This edited volume presents a macro-level overview as well as insightful case studies of CTIS in the Chinese context, and includes detailed lists of references directing the reader to vital further sources. The scope and usefulness of the book are greatly enhanced by the decision to cover both corpus-based translation and interpreting studies, and the range of topics addressed, from diachronic variation, to language contact, semantic prosody, translator style, and cognition-based translation studies, to name just a few, provides the reader with an excellent snapshot of the current concerns of Chinese scholars working in CTIS. The careful glossing of all linguistic examples, the co-presence of English, and the cultural explanations given, all make the volume readily accessible to non-Chinese speakers, and methodologies are generally very well documented, so that individual studies could be easily replicated using other data or other language pairs. The volume thus appears to achieve its aim of opening up Chinese CTIS to a wider readership, allowing readers to learn about the development, current situation, and potential perspectives of CTIS in the Chinese context. However, while the volume on the whole achieves a good balance of subfields in CTIS, some readers might lament the absence of a separate chapter on pedagogy or translator training in the Chinese context. Corpora have proved to be powerful resources for translators and interpreters–whether trainee or professional–who wish to identify language patterns, solve translation problems and enhance naturalness in their translating or interpreting practice, and the ability to use electronic corpora adequately has been recognized as one of the elements of translation competence (see, for example, Beeby et al. 2009; López-Rodríguez 2016). A separate chapter on the application of corpora in translation and interpreting teaching in China would have complemented existing research in this area, which tends to be dominated by writers dealing with European languages. Furthermore, the use of statistics in most chapters is limited to frequency analysis, leaving the vast realm of possibilities treated by writers like De Sutter and Lefer (2020) untouched. Besides conventional corpus methods, techniques and software, more advanced techniques for analysis and visualization involving multidimensional analysis, clustering and regression, etc., may prove useful in assessing the validity of theoretical claims.