Translation for professionals: corpus-based study of translation universals in computing

Translation for professionals: corpus-based study of translation universals in computing Baorong Huang Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University huangbaorong2000@163.com Abstract Translation universals have been studied extensively in literature, politics, and business but rarely touched in technical field. This paper presents the investigation of translation universals in a new corpus consisting of articles translated by Chinese professionals in computing from English journals and magazines by using statistic findings, principal component analysis and visualization tools to unveil the general patterns, i.e., the translation universals and the individual characteristics in the specific domain of computing. Insights on the underlying motivations, guided by the entropy theory, the Principle of Least Effort, and the principle of relevance, are blended to explain the universals in technical translation in computing. To my knowledge, it is the first attempt that studies the translation universals in technical translation with both the translation corpus and the reference corpus collected from the same magazine. 1 Introduction The juxtaposition of the language features and the comparison of them are widely used in the studies of Corpus Linguistics. Douglas Biber (1998) explained the power of language features spanning from lexicography to grammar in the analysis of the discourses, registers and varieties. Mona Baker (1995), in the study of Translational English Corpus (TEC), proposed several features to measure the deviations of the translational English text from the original English text, including TTR, mean sentence length, reporting structures and so on. Language features are inexhaustive, and linguists, with their ingenious minds, often suggested new variables in the corpus-based studies of the translational Chinese text and the verification of translation universals, including n-gram analysis, connectives analysis, passive construction or specific constructions (Richard Xiao and Xianyao Hu, 2015), reporting structure and direct speech/free indirect speech (Libo Huang, 2015), BEI construction (Kaibao Hu, 2016), specific verbs like ‘jinxin’ (Guangrong Dai, 2016). In order to cope with the challenge of the increasing number of features, multivariate analysis (Hermann Moisl, 2006), cluster analysis (Hermann Moisl, 2015) and triangulation (Paul Baker and Jesse Egbert, 2016) are proposed to handle the feature explosion and reveal the relations among these features and the patterns determined jointly by such features. This paper applied principle component analysis (PCA) and visualization tools to unveil both the general trend and idiosyncratic features in the technical Chinese translations, and made a tentative unification of the information theory in communication, the Principle of Least Effort and the principle of relevance in pragmatics to elaborate on the reasons why the professionals deliberately chose the wordings and syntactic patterns that demonstrated normalization, simplification, and explication in the translation of technical Chinese in computing. 2 Related Literature Common patterns in translation behaviors, called translation universals, after they have proposed by the scholars (Gideon Toury, 2004; Mona Baker et al., 1993; Alet Kruger, 2004; Kirsten Malmkjær, 2011), have been studied extensively in Chinese- English translation. Translation universals in a wide range of fields have been investigated, including politics (Kaibao Hu et al., 2015a), literature (Kaibao Hu, 2015b), and businesses …

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