Abstract
Chinese-English parallel corpora mainly comprise English source texts translated into Chinese, leaving a significant gap for investigating the Chinese-to-English translation direction. This thesis aims to fill this gap by building a parallel corpus named ZHEN, which contains approximately one million characters of contemporary simplified Chinese source texts aligned with authentic translations into English.
The first objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the utility of ZHEN in descriptive translation studies by addressing Chinese-to-English translation questions. Three corpus-driven analyses were conducted. The first analysis compared the Chinese subcorpus of ZHEN with a general non-translated simplified Chinese corpus to investigate the types of Chinese texts selected for translation. The second analysis compared the English subcorpus of ZHEN with a non-translated English corpus to examine lexical and discourse differences between English translated from Chinese and non-translated English. The third analysis used parallel concordances to identify Chinese-to-English translation problems.
Several significant findings emerged from the study. Firstly, it revealed significant differences between Chinese external and internal communications, influenced by ideology. Secondly, the use of adverbs and modal verbs differed dramatically between the non-translated English corpus and the translated English corpus from Chinese. Lastly, the study demonstrated that investing in parallel concordances and collocations can assist in translating culture-specific goods from Chinese to English.
Overall, this thesis addresses the lack of under-resourced Chinese-to-English translation direction by building a parallel corpus and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of Chinese-to-English translation.