Corpus-based studies of translational Chinese using comparable corpora (translated vs. natively written Chinese) can reveal T-universals but cannot settle whether the S-universal properties of translated Chinese — most notably explicitation and source-language interference — are genuinely induced by the English source language or are inherent to the translation process itself. The open problem, stated in the concluding discussion of Xiao and Dai (2014) and still unresolved, is to use English–Chinese parallel corpus evidence to (i) decompose observed explicitation into obligatory explicitation (forced by English–Chinese structural differences), optional/pragmatic explicitation (reflecting stylistic and cultural choices), and translation-inherent explicitation (arising from the translation process), and (ii) quantify the degree to which specific source-text features shine through into translated Chinese. Feature-specific parallel studies exist, but the decomposition has so far been carried out only for typologically close European pairs; the integrated English–Chinese question remains open.

Background

When a text is translated, the resulting language differs measurably both from its source text and from texts originally written in the target language; translated language has been called a "third code" between the source and target languages. Corpus-based translation studies investigates such differences empirically. A translation universal (TU) hypothesis is a proposed recurring property of translated texts; Chesterman (2004) distinguishes S-universals — systematic differences between translations and their source texts, reflecting how translators process the source text — from T-universals — systematic differences between translations and comparable non-translated texts in the same target language, reflecting how translators use the target language. Two corpus designs matter here. A comparable corpus contrasts translated texts with natively written texts in the same language; it can directly reveal T-universals but only gives indirect evidence about S-universals. A parallel corpus aligns source texts with their translations, allowing each translated segment to be compared with what it was translated from. Explicitation is the hypothesized tendency of translations to spell things out rather than leave them implicit; a widely used typology distinguishes obligatory explicitation (forced by structural differences between the two languages, e.g. grammatical categories the target language must mark), optional and pragmatic explicitation (stylistic and culture-driven choices), and translation-inherent explicitation (claimed to arise from the translation process itself, independent of any source-text trigger). Whether the last category exists at all is contested: Becher (2010) argues that the notion of translation-inherent explicitation is an unfounded dogma, and Klaudy and Károly (2005) document an operational asymmetry between explicitation and implicitation. Source-language interference (or "shining through") is the carrying-over of source-language lexical or grammatical patterns into the translation. Levelling out (also called convergence) is the hypothesized tendency of translated texts to be more homogeneous than native texts — showing less variance across texts on measures such as lexical density, type-token ratio, and sentence length; it has been described as the least empirically substantiated TU hypothesis, and it is expected to depend on the typological distance between the languages involved. Xiao and Dai (2014) evaluated these hypotheses for English-to-Chinese translation using two balanced one-million-word comparable corpora: the Zhejiang University Corpus of Translational Chinese (ZCTC) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC). They found translational Chinese more explicit, mixed evidence for simplification (the hypothesis that translations are linguistically simpler than comparable native texts), evidence of both target-language unique-item under-representation (unique items being target-language expressions that have no direct counterpart in the source language and that translations therefore tend to under-use) and source-language interference, and no support for normalisation (the hypothesis that translations conform to, or even exaggerate, patterns typical of native texts in the target language). Because their design was purely comparable-corpus, they could not determine whether the observed explicitation and interference are source-induced; the Levelling-out hypothesis could not be quantified because it involves heterogeneous features at multiple linguistic levels. English and Chinese are genetically unrelated and typologically distant, so this language pair is a critical test case for claims that these properties are universals of translation rather than artifacts of closely related European language pairs (cf. Hu, Xiao and Hardie 2019 for the parallel programme on translational English).

Problem Statement

On the basis of English–Chinese parallel corpus evidence (source texts aligned with their translations, plus a comparable corpus of natively written Chinese), determine the extent to which the S-universal properties of translational Chinese are genuinely induced by the English source language rather than inherent in the translation process. Concretely: (1) decompose the explicitation observed in translated Chinese into obligatory explicitation forced by English–Chinese structural differences, optional/pragmatic explicitation reflecting stylistic and cultural choices, and translation-inherent explicitation arising from the translation process itself, and estimate the relative share of each, where a defended estimate of zero or of non-identifiability counts as a resolution of (1); and (2) quantify the degree to which specific source-text features (lexical, grammatical, and discourse-level patterns, at one or more of these levels) shine through into translational Chinese, addressing its relationship to target-language unique-item under-representation — whether the two can be separated empirically is itself at issue, since prior work has argued that under-representation may be an expression of interference. Both deliverables share one scientific objective: establishing, for the typologically distant English–Chinese pair, which hypothesized translation-universal properties of translational Chinese are source-induced artifacts of cross-linguistic structure and which are genuine properties of the translation process, so that the English-based translation-universal hypotheses can be accepted, refined, or rejected from the Chinese perspective.

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