Temporal and Locational Adverbial Placement in Chinese–English and English–Chinese Translation: Corpus-Based Evidence from Advanced Chinese Learners of English

This study examines how 35 second-year Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) students realized and placed temporal and locational adverbials in Chinese–English and English–Chinese translation. A learner translation corpus provided manually annotated data on adverbial type, form and position. Generalized linear mixed-effects models tested associations of realization and placement with form and position in the source text and associations of placement with form in the translation. In Chinese–English translation, temporal adverbials were more likely to retain their type when they were phrases or clauses rather than words and when they occurred initially rather than medially in the source text. In the translations, temporal words favored final position, whereas phrases and clauses favored placement before the predicate. For locational adverbials, neither realization nor placement differed significantly between canonical sentences and non-canonical sentences with locative–verb–subject (LVS) constructions. In English–Chinese translation, all temporal and locational adverbials realized as the same adverbial type occurred before the predicate. Locational adverbials occurring initially in the English source texts were usually placed initially in Chinese, whereas those occurring finally were more often placed medially. No comparable association was found for the placement of temporal adverbials. Learners’ realization and placement choices varied across adverbial types and translation directions.