Form and meaning in collocations: a corpus-driven study on translation universals in Chinese-to-English business translation

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines the potential features of Chinese–English translated business texts by investigating collocation use as a linguistic feature to test the two translation universals (TUs) of simplification and explicitation in two comparable corpora. We employed two linguistic indicators – namely, collocability and delexicalization – to generalize the distinctive features of collocation distribution patterns in a corpus of Chinese–English translated business texts. The findings show that translated texts in our study were characterized by the over-use of free combinations and collocations with a literal sense, and under-use of bound collocations, idioms and collocations with a delexical sense. Therefore, our findings confirm that the translational business English in our corpus did indeed reflect TU claims, as the collocations in the translated text appeared to be both ‘simpler’ in form and more ‘explicit’ in meaning than native-speaker business English.

KEYWORDS:

• collocation
• translational business English
• corpus-driven approach
• translation universals
• contrastive analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to sincerely thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr. Haoda Feng is associate professor and Master supervisor at Bohai University, specializing in translation studies, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics.

Dr. Ineke Crezee is associate professor and PhD supervisor at Auckland University of Technology, specializing in translation studies, and has published a number of books at John Benjamins publishing company.

Dr. Lynn Grant is senior lecturer and PhD supervisor at Auckland University of Technology, specializing in corpus linguistics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Liaoning Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science under Grant [L16BYY004] and [L17BYY003]. This research was conducted at Auckland University of Technology.