EXPLORING WORD CLASS RELATIONS IN CHINESE-ENGLISH POLITICAL TRANSLATION: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF XI JINPING: THE GOVERNANCE OF CHINA II

Translation universal has been an important domain of research in corpus-based translation studies. While previous studies have examined word class relations in prose translation and the diachronic change of explicitation in translation, there is a relative lack of research on word class relations in political translation. To address this gap, the study delves into word class relations in political translation using self-built comparable corpora of, specifically, the Chinese source texts (ST) and English target texts (TT) of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China II, as well as the original English texts (OET) of State of the Union Address 2013-2016. The results demonstrate that significant differences have been observed in most of the distributions of word classes in the ST, the TT, and the OET, yet the word classes in the TT are generally closer to their counterparts in the OET, which could be possibly interpreted through the translation team’s guiding principle of “close to foreign audiences’ ways of thinking”. In addition, the word classes of the TT show different degrees of correlation with those of the ST, while the word classes of the OET have no significant correlation with either the ST or the TT, thus indicating the source language effect of word class translation. Hence, this study offers empirical and quantitative findings for understanding the linguistic features of Chinese political translation.