SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Corpus studies in the area of translation constitute a new, exciting and rapidly expanding area of research. This study focuses on the design of a specific corpus for the analysis of specific linguistic features that relate to translator behaviour. Thus a parallel English-Chinese corpus is built with source texts in English, that is, classic Anglo-American novels, and two types of target texts: translations of those same novels from the areas of Mainland China and Taiwan. This Corpus is then used to study specific linguistic elements that may reveal translation strategies employed by the translators in these two areas. The linguistic features under consideration are terms of address. Terms of address play a prominent role in daily communication and are linked to cultural idiosyncrasies and politeness norms. In the universe of discourse of a novel, terms of address are used by characters according to their degree of familiarity with their interlocutors and their general social standing. Since the translation of novels involves the general transfer of cultural values, the use of terms of address is bound to be affected by the values with which the target text may comply. The corpus designed here indeed helps identify several types of translation strategies employed by Chinese translators who may not always render terms of address straightforward, especially when they are torn between issues of representing the original accurately and of increasing its readability. Furthermore, the findings in this study reveal that the group of translators from each area consistently show preferences for similar strategies when dealing with terms of address. Translators from China tend to retain elements of original, while Taiwanese translators tend to adapt those same elements to what could be considered more 'natural' language that does not disrupt the reading process.