The Diachronic Change Of Lexical Creativity In Translated Chinese ——A Case Study Of The Origin Of Species

Creativity is the key by which translators make a conscious effort in finding a creative equivalent solution within certain context,especially in the lexical aspect,giving them the opportunity to enrich vocabulary and expressions for target language.Existing studies have applied corpus-based methods to capture the lexical creativity in translated language（Kenny 2014;Vintar 2016）,and yet they remain largely an exploration on the synchronic level.This paper takes a close look at creative words and their diachronic change across four translated Chinese versions of The Origin of Species with reference to nontranslated Chinese biological literature.Four versions are Zhou Shuren,Ye Duzhuang and Fang Zongxi’s translation in 1955 and their second translation in 1995,Xie Yunzhen’s translation in 1972 and Arthur Shu Degan’s translation in 2010.It is designed to identify creative lexical elements including new words and old words with new usages by way of two methods respectively:by comparing word lists of translated Chinese texts to reference corpora and by training word vector models to explore semantic change of words appearing in both corpora.The results indicate that each translation contains a number of unique lexical items under the reference of a contemporaneous corpus.Most of the new words are nouns related to the names of human,animals and plants.In diachronic comparison,there is a replaceable relationship among words unique to individual texts,partly shows the translator’s own creativity.At the same time,the analysis of the remaining existing words suggests verbs tend to be more probable in generating unexpected usages in a variety of contexts.The usage differences may be the result of other factors rather than translators’active choice and some of them may be retained in the following translations,reflecting the acceptance of translation’s creativity.These findings testify to the existence of lexical creativity in the non-literary translations and suggest the diachronic exploration reveals language change caused by translation.The research with the design of four diachronic translations contributes to an existing body of research on lexical creativity and language change in translation and has implications for cognitive linguistics and recognizing the underlying mechanism of generating new forms or meaning.