DEGREE OF INTENSITY in English-Chinese translation: a corpus-based approach

The claim in translation studies that Chinese tends to have a preference for stronger or more exaggerated terms than does English has not been substantiated by any hard linguistic evidence. One system to approach such perceived differences in intensity is degree of intensity (DOI), which is an important device of fine-tuning taken by a speaker to express interpersonal judgments. However, it has not been systematically studied, in quantitative terms, for the Chinese language, nor has a contrastive study been conducted between English and Chinese. This study aims to adopt a corpus-based approach and investigate the phenomenon, using the Chinese translation of a politically volatile English autobiography by a Chinese migrant writer, Wild Swans (Chang 1991), as the domain of study, and comparing it with another translation of this kind and against two reference corpora of non-translated texts (FLOB and LCMC). The findings of the research suggest that Chinese indeed prefers more and higher degrees of intensity, but they also show that translator’s choice-making plays an important role in the translation of degree of intensity.