Phraseology in Corpus-based transaltion studies : stylistic study of two contempoarary Chinese translation of Cervantes's Don Quijote

The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of Cervantes???s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese, and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages. The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote. Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among other findings, while Liu???s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and also of Yang???s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the second half of Liu???s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies.Imperial Users onl

Phraseology in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Stylistic Study of Two Contemporary Chinese Translations of Cervantes's Don Quijote

The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese, and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages. The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote. Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among other findings, while Liu’s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and also of Yang’s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the second half of Liu’s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies

Word alignment in English-Chinese parallel corpora

Word alignment in bilingual or multilingual parallel corpora has been a challenging issue for natural language engineering. An efficient algorithm for automatically aligning word translation equivalents across different languages will be of use for a number of practical applications such as multilingual lexical construction, machine translation, etc. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm for English–Chinese word alignment, which incorporates co‐occurrence association measures, word distribution distances, English word lemmatization, and part‐of‐speech information. Eleven co‐occurrence association coefficients and eight distance measures of word distribution are explored to compare their efficiency for word alignment. The paper also describes an experiment in which the algorithm is evaluated on sentence‐aligned English–Chinese parallel corpora. In the experiment, the algorithm produced encouraging success rates on two test corpora, with the highest success rate of 89.37 per cent. It provides a practical tool for extracting word translation equivalents from English–Chinese parallel corpora

Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A Corpus-assisted Study of the Metalanguage of Sarcasm and Irony.

This thesis represents the first in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels. The investigation is based on a corpus of c. 96 million words taken from two online forums, one based in the UK and one in Italy. For the analysis, I combine corpus linguistics and more traditional qualitative approaches. A key aspect to the analytic process is that it is led by participant understandings of mock politeness and so I take a bottom-up approach to filling some of the gaps in the field. The research aims to tackle three questions. The first addresses which metapragmatic labels are used to refer to mock politeness in the (British) English and Italian data. In the second question, I ask how these metapragmatic labels and the behaviours which they describe relate to one another within and across languages. In the third question, I ask what is the relationship between (a) the English and Italian first-order uses of these metapragmatic labels and the behaviours which they describe and (b) the second order descriptions. In this regard, the use of data from two different cultures is important because it provides an opportunity to investigate to what extent the existing theory accounts for behaviours in different contexts. The findings show that mock politeness cannot be equated with sarcasm, and that the metapragmatic label which may be applied to a mock polite interaction depends on a range of contextual factors, including the participation role of the evaluator and gender of the performer. The range of metapragmatic labels and realisation of mock politeness vary across the two sub-corpora, and the research showed that mock politeness is both structurally and functionally more varied than anticipated by the existing literature