Comparable and Parallel Corpus Approaches to the Third Code: English and Chinese Perspectives

With increasing globalisation, translation has nowadays played an ever more important role than before in helping West to meet East or vice versa. Translation Studies is an area of research that has been both aided greatly and advanced by the corpus methodology over the past two decades. As translating is a kind of mediated communication involving different languages, the effect of the source language on the translation is inevitable and strong enough to make the translational language perceptibly different from the target native language. The proposed research, which involves international collaboration between Lancaster University in the UK and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is a corpus-based study of the common linguistic and textual features of translations, from the perspectives of English and Chinese, two genetically distinct major languages in the world, by taking an innovative composite methodology that combines the comparable corpus approach and the parallel corpus approach to language studies on the basis of sizeable corpora of authentic language use in English and Chinese. The combination of i) the balanced coverage of usage contexts in language use, ii) the strict comparability of the corpora used, iii) the typological distance between English and Chinese as two distinctly different languages, iv) the innovative composite corpus-based approach integrating comparable corpus and parallel corpus analysis, and v) the inclusion of register variation as a variable, will enable the researchers to investigate the linguistic and textual features of translational language more systematically and achieve more reliable research outcomes than ever before. Research of this kind can cast new light on the translation process and help to uncover translation norms, which are of theoretical significance for Translation Studies as well as practical importance for translation teaching, translator training and translation practice.

In addition to the academic users mentioned earlier, non-academic beneficiaries of the proposed research include a) translation students and trainee translators as well as their teachers; b) translation practitioners; and c) professional bodies of translation in multilingual societies such as the Hong Kong Translation Society. The research outcomes and the corpus resources to be produced on the proposed project will be of significant practical and pedagogical value to translation teaching and training, thus benefiting translation students and trainees as well as their teachers. Knowledge transfer based on the research data and outputs, including corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) in translation teaching and translator training and the tool development for translation practitioners, will be explored as part of the project. In addition, translation practitioners and members of professional bodies will benefit from the public lectures, seminars and workshops based on the research outputs, data and tools produced in our research. (Please refer to the Pathways to Impact attachment for our plan to engage these non-academic users.)