Negation in English: A corpus-based study

Corpus-based Translation Studies focuses on translation as a product by comparing comparable corpora of translational and non-translational texts. A number of distinctive features of translational English in relation to native English have been uncovered. Nevertheless, research of this area has so far been confined largely to translational English translated from closely related European languages. If the features of translational language that have been reported are to be generalised as “translation universals”, the language pairs involved must not be restricted to English and closely related European languages. Clearly, evidence from “genetically” distinct language pairs such as English and Chinese is arguably more convincing, if not indispensable. This article explores potential features of translational Chinese on the basis of two balanced monolingual comparable corpora of Mandarin Chinese. The implications of the study for translation universal hypotheses will also be discussed.