A Corpus-based Investigation on Translation Universals in Chinese-into-English Translations by Chinese Translators

This paper conducts a comparative study with the data drawn from a self-built comparable corpus of translated English by Chinese translators and native English corpus, aiming to examine the degree to which Translation Universals are identifiable in the translations of Chinese translators at both lexical and syntactic levels. The findings show that "simplification" is not apparent in translated English but other features such as "explicitation", "normalization" and "source language shining" are identifiable. This shows that Chinese translators, as a unique group of translators, have a fairly good command of English language, but are influenced to a certain degree by their mother tongue.