Translation Universals In Translational English Corporate Communication Materials ——A Corpus-Based Study Of Chairman’s Letter In Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Since Mona Baker put forward the hypothesis of translation universals in 1993,a number of corpus-based studies have been conducted to confirm or reject the hypothesis.However,it remains largely untested in many genres,including business communication texts.As such,this study aims to explore whether translation universals also figure prominently in Chairman’s Letters in Corporate Social Responsibility（CSR）Reports,a representative sample of corporate communication materials.CSR Reports are essential for a company’s image and visibility.And Chairman’s Letter sets the stage for introducing the company’s contribution to the environment,society and governance,making its translation particularly important.Chairman’s Letters from the 2020 CSR reports of 40 Chinese companies and 60 American ones listed on the Fortune 500 List of Companies 2021 are selected to compile a comparable corpus,with a subcorpus of translational English texts and one of original English texts.Antconc 4.0.5,WordSmith 8.0 and Coh-Metrix 3.0 are used to quantitatively analyze how the two subcorpora differ from each other in such linguistic features as the average word,sentence and paragraph length,lexical diversity,lexical density,the frequency of contractions used and cohesion-related indicators.The statistics are followed by independent t-tests and Chi-square tests carried out on SPSS to determine whether the differences are significant.Statistical results show that translational Chairman’s Letters are not characterized by simplification and explicitation,but by normalization.The reasons behind these features include the negative transfer of the source text to the translation,the already-high degree of formality of the original text and the lack of quality assurance by native speakers.This study serves as an inspiration to future studies on translation universals,and provides some insight for future corpus-based translation studies on other corporate communication materials and even other genres.