A Multi-Dimensional Analysis Of Translational And Non-translational English Across Registers

Not until around the 1990s did corpus translation studies begin to emerge and flourish.It proposed and developed "translation universal hypothesis".While this hypothesis receives extensive attention among academics,a bountiful of studies merely centered upon the lexico-grammatical linguistic features of translated texts to confirm the translation universals.To address the lacuna,this study employs lexical and grammatical features as an entry point and centers its attention on how to interpret the functional aspects that underpin the linguistic characteristics.The study aims to compare translational and native English across Biber’s(1988)six discourse dimensions,as well as assess the degree to which translational English adheres to the translation universal hypothesis.The primary contribution of this study lies in its meticulous exploration of the variation in the four sub-registers of translational English.Specifically,the research is designed to determine the extent to which translational English differs from non-translational English at the discourse level,and identify the linguistic features and their contributions to such variations.The current study is to avail of the two corpora above with a view to analyzing the discourse functions from the six dimensions and 67 linguistic features which were introduced in Biber(1988).Two one-million-word comparable corpora,the Corpus of Translational English(COTE)and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English(FLOB)were utilized for the current study.Every text from four registers,including news,academic prose,general prose,and fiction has been tagged and analyzed via the Multi-dimensional Analysis Tagger(Nini,2019).Their dimension scores and z-scores of the 67 linguistic features of all the files were calculated,which were fed into SPSS to operate independent samples-t-tests to determine whether the dimension scores and the use of linguistic features across four genres and between translational English and non-translational English exhibit significant differences.The principal finding of this research is that there exist four dimensions on which translational English and non-translational language differ significantly from each other:explicit vs.situation-dependent reference,overt expression of persuasion,vs non-abstract information and online information elaboration.Translational English,as a whole,is more context-independent and abstract;it has fewer of linguistic features capable of convincing the audience but its information is organized in a more elaborate manner.Moreover,the research confirms that translational English is primarily characterized by explicitation,which is exemplified by the overuse of demonstratives,prepositions,independent clause coordination,and sentence relatives in the translational English as a whole as well as its four sub-registers.A possible cause may lie in the translators’ efforts to improve the"acceptability" of their work and in their inclination to extract the "common divisor"between the two languages.Taken together,the study concludes that there are similarities in translational texts of different styles within the same language,suggesting the existence of translational commonalities.By examining English as an example,the researcher observes significant and consistent distinctions between translational English and original English across four genres,which further supports the idea that a language has multiple varieties,each with their own sets of linguistic features and registers.Having probed into the discourse functions carried by translational language,the results of this research provide quantitative support for all the Baker’s(1996)translation universals.Furthermore,the study is expected to be of value to practitioners wishing to provide more targeted instruction based on the defining features of translational language in different registers.