A Corpus-based Study On The Linguistic Features Of Translated Academic Texts

This thesis is a corpus-based study on the linguistic features of translated academic texts with the Chinese translation of Handbook of Social Justice in Education as a case study.The present study also aims to discover the motivations behind the linguistic features during the process of translation from English to Chinese based on a statistical analysis of the bilingual parallel corpus and reference corpus of Chinese original texts.In general,the linguistic features of translated academic texts include simplification,normalization and explicitation.Firstly,translated texts show an obvious tendency of simplification in terms of lexical density and high-frequency words,and they also exhibit some features of English source texts,namely,the overuse of nouns and pronouns.Secondly,we can observe a clear tendency of normalization on the basis of general part-of-speech(POS)distribution as translated texts share more similar features with Chinese original texts than with English source texts.Finally,translated texts also manifest a strong tendency of explicitation in terms of the use of logical connectives with varying degrees of explicitation among different translators.The study also explores the motivations behind the linguistic features of translated academic texts.Firstly,on the one hand,the observed tendency of simplification can be attributed to lexical change and grammatical structure of Chinese and English.On the other hand,translators also simplify the source texts during the process of translation in order to achieve successful communication with target readers.Secondly,the features of normalization can be ascribed as the target text oriented norms of translation and high standard for translation set up by teachers who also participate in the process of proofreading.Thirdly,we believe the reasons for explicitation should be summed up as the following three points: the inherent characteristics of translation,difference in norms between Chinese and English,and the strategy of domestication employed by translators.Finally,the use of logical connectives is also indicative of translation strategies and procedures adopted by translators which in turn reflect their understanding of source texts.