Domains, text types, aspect marking and English–Chinese translation
Tony McEnery, Lancaster University
Richard Xiao, Lancaster University
This paper uses an English-Chinese parallel corpus, an L1 Chinese comparable corpus, and an L1 Chinese reference corpus to examine how aspectual meanings in English are translated into Chinese and explore the effects of domains, text types and translation on aspect marking. We will show that while English and Chinese both mark aspect grammatically, the aspect system in the two languages differs considerably. Even though Chinese, as an aspect language, is rich in aspect markers, covert marking (LVM) is a frequent and important strategy in Chinese discourse. The distribution of aspect markers varies significantly across domain and text type. The study also sheds new light on the translation effect by contrasting aspect marking in translated Chinese texts and L1 Chinese texts.
In: Languages in Contrast 2:2. 1999. (pp. 211–229)
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_articles.cgi?bookid=LiC 2:2&artid=270021266
Xiao, Z. & A. McEnery. (2005) A corpus-based approach to tense and aspect in English-Chinese translation. In W. Pan, H. Fu, X. Luo, M. Chase & J. Walls (eds.) Translation and Contrastive Studies. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. 114-157.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/xiaoz/papers/Shanghai_chapter.pdf
Unit 5 Multilingual corpora
http://www.corpus4u.com/upload/forum/2005070703002774.pdf