Comparable and Parallel Corpus Approaches to the Third Code: English and Chinese Perspectives

随着全球化的发展，翻译在帮助东西方交流方面发挥了前所未有的重要作用。在过去的二十年里，语料库方法论极大地促进了翻译研究的发展。由于翻译是一种涉及不同语言的中介交际，源语对翻译的影响是不可避免的，并且足以使翻译语言与目的语产生明显的差异。拟议中的研究涉及英国兰开斯特大学和香港理工大学的国际合作，是一项基于语料库的研究，从英语和汉语这两种世界上基因不同的主要语言的角度，研究翻译的共同语言和文本特征。通过采用一种创新的复合方法，将可比语料库方法与平行语料库方法结合起来，在相当大的英汉真实语言使用语料库的基础上进行语言研究。结合i)语言使用中使用语境的平衡覆盖，ii)所使用的语料库的严格可比性，iii)英汉两种截然不同的语言之间的类型学距离，iv)结合可比语料库和平行语料库分析的创新复合语料库方法，以及v)将语域变化作为变量纳入，将使研究人员能够更系统地研究翻译语言的语言和文本特征，并获得比以往更可靠的研究成果。这类研究可以揭示翻译过程，有助于揭示翻译规范，不仅对翻译研究具有理论意义，对翻译教学、翻译培训和翻译实践也具有现实意义。

With increasing globalisation, translation has nowadays played an ever more important role than before in helping West to meet East or vice versa. Translation Studies is an area of research that has been both aided greatly and advanced by the corpus methodology over the past two decades. As translating is a kind of mediated communication involving different languages, the effect of the source language on the translation is inevitable and strong enough to make the translational language perceptibly different from the target native language. The proposed research, which involves international collaboration between Lancaster University in the UK and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is a corpus-based study of the common linguistic and textual features of translations, from the perspectives of English and Chinese, two genetically distinct major languages in the world, by taking an innovative composite methodology that combines the comparable corpus approach and the parallel corpus approach to language studies on the basis of sizeable corpora of authentic language use in English and Chinese. The combination of i) the balanced coverage of usage contexts in language use, ii) the strict comparability of the corpora used, iii) the typological distance between English and Chinese as two distinctly different languages, iv) the innovative composite corpus-based approach integrating comparable corpus and parallel corpus analysis, and v) the inclusion of register variation as a variable, will enable the researchers to investigate the linguistic and textual features of translational language more systematically and achieve more reliable research outcomes than ever before. Research of this kind can cast new light on the translation process and help to uncover translation norms, which are of theoretical significance for Translation Studies as well as practical importance for translation teaching, translator training and translation practice.