This book attempts to explore style—a traditional topic—in literary translation with a corpus-based approach. A parallel corpus consisting of the English translations of modern and contemporary Chinese novels is introduced and used as the major context for the research. The style in translation is approached from perspectives of the author/the source text, the translated texts and the translator. Both the parallel model and the comparable model are employed and a multiple-complex model of comparison is proposed. The research model, both quantitative and qualitative, is duplicable within other language pairs. Apart from the basics of corpus building, readers may notice that literary texts offer an ideal context for stylistic research and a parallel corpus of literary texts may provide various observations to the style in translation. In this book, readers may find a close interaction between translation theory and practice. Tables and figures are used to help the argumentation. The book will be of interest to postgraduate students, teachers and professionals who are interested in corpus-based translation studies and stylistics.

In the course of the last 10 years corpus-based studies of translation have given rise to a sizeable and coherent body of research within Pure and Applied Translation Studies. In view of these developments, it is important to assess the state of the art of Corpus-based Translation Studies and attempt to identify some of the main trends that are likely to characterise its expansion. The aim of this volume is to examine and evaluate the main ideas, methods of analysis, findings, and pedagogical applications of this relatively young and promising field of research. Translator trainees and teachers of translation, professional translators, young researchers, and scholars in Translation Studies will find the principles, the methodology, the discoveries, and the practical applications of corpus-based research useful and inspiring. They are useful in as far as they equip translation practitioners with tools and techniques that can truly improve the quality and efficiency of their work. They are inspiring because they reveal facts of the process and product of translation which are new, consistent, and based on solid empirical foundations.

The book features recent attempts to construct corpora for specific purposes – e.g. multifactorial Dutch (parallel), Geasy Easy Language Corpus (intralingual), HK LegCo interpreting corpus – and showcases sophisticated and innovative corpus analysis methods. It proposes new approaches to address classical themes – i.e. translation pedagogy, translation norms and equivalence, principles of translation – and brings interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. contrastive linguistics, cognition and metaphor studies – to cast new light. It is a timely reference for the researchers as well as postgraduate students who are interested in the applications of corpus technology to solving translation and interpreting problems.

The book addresses different areas of corpus-based translation studies, including corpus-based study of translation features, translator’s style, norms of translation, translation practice, translator training and interpreting. It begins by tracing the development of corpus-based translation studies and introducing the compilation of different types of corpora for translation research. The use of corpora in different research areas is then discussed in detail, and the implications and limitations of corpus-based translation studies are addressed. Featuring the use of figures, tables, illustrations and case studies, as well as discussion of methodological issues, the book offers a practical guide to corpus-based translation. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and professionals who are interested in translation studies, interpreting studies or computer-aided translation.

Computers offer new perspectives in the study of language, allowing us to see phenomena that previously remained obscure because of the limitations of our vantage points. It is not uncommon for computers to be likened to the telescope, or microscope, in this respect. In this pioneering computer-assisted study of translation, Dorothy Kenny suggests another image, that of the kaleidoscope: playful changes of perspective using corpus-processing software allow textual patterns to come into focus and then recede again as others take their place. And against the background of repeated patterns in a corpus, creative uses of language gain a particular prominence. In Lexis and Creativity in Translation, Kenny monitors the translation of creative source-text word forms and collocations uncovered in a specially constructed German-English parallel corpus of literary texts. Using an abundance of examples, she reveals evidence of both normalization and ingenious creativity in translation. Her discussion of lexical creativity draws on insights from traditional morphology, structural semantics and, most notably, neo-Firthian corpus linguistics, suggesting that rumours of the demise of linguistics in translation studies are greatly exaggerated. Lexis and Creativity in Translation is essential reading for anyone interested in corpus linguistics and its impact so far on translation studies. The book also offers theoretical and practical guidance for researchers who wish to conduct their own corpus-based investigations of translation. No previous knowledge of German, corpus linguistics or computing is assumed.

This book introduces the latest advances in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS), a thriving subfield of Translation Studies which forms an important part of both translator training and empirical translation research. Largely empirical and exploratory, a distinctive feature of CBTS is the development and exploration of quantitative linguistic data in search of useful patterns of variation and change in translation. With the introduction of textual statistics to Translation Studies, CBTS has geared towards a new research direction that is more systematic in the identification of translation patterns; and more explanatory of any linguistic variations identified in translations. The book traces the advances from the advent of language corpora in translation studies, to the new textual dimensions and shift towards a probability-variation model. Such advances made in CBTS have enabled in-depth analyses of translation by establishing useful links between a translation and the social and cultural context in which the translation is produced, circulated and consumed.

This volume argues for an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and translation of literary style, based on a mutually supportive combination of traditional close reading and ‘distant’ reading, involving corpus-linguistic analysis and text-visualisation. The book contextualizes this approach within the broader story of the development of computer-assisted translation -- including machine translation and the use of CAT tools -- and elucidates the ways in which the approach can lead to better informed translations than those based on close reading alone. This study represents the first systematic attempt to use corpus linguistics and text-visualisation in the process of translating individual literary texts, as opposed to comparing and analysing already published originals and their translations. Using the case study of his translation into English of Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti’s 1965 novel Gracías por el Fuego, Youdale showcases how a close and distant reading approach (CDR) enhances the translator’s ability to detect and measure a variety of stylistic features, ranging from sentence length and structure to lexical richness and repetition, both in the source text and in their own draft translation, thus assisting them with the task of revision. The book reflects on the benefits and limitations of a CDR approach, its scalability and broader applicability in translation studies and related disciplines, making this key reading for translators, postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of literary translation, corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics and narratology.