Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.

This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLO...

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Autores principales:	Kanglong Liu, Muhammad Afzaal
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/9ed093dc4bba4449a8d73451396e2362
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:9ed093dc4bba4449a8d73451396e23622021-12-02T20:10:10ZSyntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.1932-620310.1371/journal.pone.0253454https://doaj.org/article/9ed093dc4bba4449a8d73451396e23622021-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253454https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.Kanglong LiuMuhammad AfzaalPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 6, p e0253454 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Kanglong Liu Muhammad Afzaal Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
description	This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.
format	article
author	Kanglong Liu Muhammad Afzaal
author_facet	Kanglong Liu Muhammad Afzaal
author_sort	Kanglong Liu
title	Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
title_short	Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
title_full	Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
title_fullStr	Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
title_full_unstemmed	Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.
title_sort	syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: a corpus-based study of simplification.
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/9ed093dc4bba4449a8d73451396e2362
work_keys_str_mv	AT kanglongliu syntacticcomplexityintranslatedandnontranslatedtextsacorpusbasedstudyofsimplification AT muhammadafzaal syntacticcomplexityintranslatedandnontranslatedtextsacorpusbasedstudyofsimplification
_version_	1718375015931445248

Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.

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