A Contrastive Study On Lexical Bundles In Translated And Non-translated English Texts

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth of corpus-based translation studies which appeared in the beginning of the1990s. Attempts have been made by translation scholars to demonstrate some distinctive features of translated language in terms of lexis, syntactic, and textual organization. The present study made a comparative analysis on translated and non-translated English texts from the perspective of lexical bundles. Considering that lexical bundles play an important role in the fluency and idiomaticity of language production, it is hoped that the result of this study could help translators become more proficient in translating process by raising awareness of lexical bundles.The data analyzed in this research was drawn from a monolingual comparable corpus which consists of two separate subcorpora:translated English corpus and non-translated English corpus. With the aid of Wordsmith Tools, four-word lexical bundles were extracted from the corpora and categorized from structure and function perspective following Biber’s criterion. By means of quantitative and qualitative analysis, differences between lexical bundles used in translated and non-translated English were revealed in this study.Two hypotheses were confirmed in the study:(1) Lexical bundles tend to be less diverse in translated English texts than non-translated English texts.(2) Translated texts show a stronger tendency to draw heavily on a small number of lexical bundles in comparison with non-translated texts. Despite the difference of lexical bundles in terms of density and distribution, the use of structural and functional lexical bundles also displayed their own features. It can be found that translators tend to use more lexical bundles containing NP and PP fragments than original authors. By contrast, there are more "verb phrase" bundles occurring in non-translated English texts than those in translated English texts. For the functional types of lexical bundles, epistemic stance bundles and discourse organization bundles are used more frequently in translated English corpus than in non-translated English corpus. Besides, translators seem to use more referential bundles than original authors.The results show that translators are more conservative in their use of language. They tend to prefer more standard forms of the language and try to make the translated texts more explicit and cohesive by using a large number of functional lexical bundles.