Revealing the translator's style: A corpus-based study of english translations of Mencius.

Based on the self-built English translation corpus of Mencius, this study conducts a lexical, syntactical and textual comparative analysis of Mencius English translations by James Legge (1861), Leonard A.Lyall (1932) and D.C.Lau (1970) through adopting a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and employing Tokenizer, Tree Tagger, WordSmith8.0, AntConc and Readability Analyzer software. By analyzing representative translation examples and the para-text of each translation, this study explores the relationship among the historical background, translator's cultural identity and translation motivation. The results reveal that the translator's style is closely related to the translation strategy determined by the translation purpose rooted in translator's cultural identity in different historical and social backgrounds.The study findings will bring a new perspective for the translator's cultural identity research, contribute to the translator's style study and deepen the understanding of the English translation and overseas dissemination of Mencius with the help of corpus technology.

An investigation of the diachronic trend of dependency distance minimization in magazines and news.

The principle of minimization of dependency distance (DD) can reduce the working memory burden of language speakers, that is, reduce the cognitive burden during the communication process. This investigation demonstrated the dependency distance (based on the dependency grammar) minimization principle from a diachronic perspective in two text types of magazines and news with inspection indicators of mean dependency distance (MDD) and normalized dependency distance (NDD). This research revealed a fluctuation tendency around a certain axis concerning diachronic dependency distance variation. This research also indicated that news text balances language complexity and communication efficiency better than magazine text.

A semantic similarity analysis of multiple English translations of The Analects: Based on a natural language processing algorithm.

Working from the readers' perspective, this study first investigates the online acceptance of the complete English translations of The Analects by investigating the number of online comments, downloads, academic citations, and other factors, and it ranks the different English versions according to how well they are received. The complete English translations of The Analects by D. C. Lau, James Legge, and 15 other translators are found to be well received by readers on mainstream online platforms. Then, based on five natural language processing (NLP) algorithms (TF-IDF, Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT, and SimHash), the 15 well-received English versions of The Analects are taken as samples to calculate semantic similarity. By comparing the semantic differences among the texts, this study analyzes the factors that affect the diversification of translated texts. (1) The influence of Chinese annotation on the translation semantics is great, even the greatest among many influential factors; and (2) different translators' identities, the translation era, the translation purpose, and the translation background do not significantly affect the semantic influence of the translation. On the one hand, the readers can understand the differences between the different translations and choose an appropriate translation for their reading and learning more effectively. On the other hand, using the algorithms of NLP, we focus on the semantic similarity of different English translations of The Analects and analyze them to show the semantic differences quantitatively, which makes the comparison more intuitive and efficiently. Such a quantitative presentation of the results draws scholars' attention to the differences in the translations.