Hu, Kaibao and Kim, Kyung Hye (2020): Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts: Present and Future. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 256 p.

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) …