Quantitative Analysis of the Explicitness in Translated Chinese Texts: Through the Lens of Diachronic Comparable Corpora

Translation, as one locus of language contact, has played a significant role in the history of language as it does in those of ideas and cultures.The problem about whether explicitness, as a typical feature of translated texts has been transferred into the target language needs to be explored further.This paper observes the change of explicitness in translated language and the effect it might exert on target Language through a comparison between Chinese translated texts and non-translated texts diachronically.The findings are as follows:1) Overall, translated Chinese texts change concomitantly with original Chinese texts in such indicators as standard type/token ratio, average segmental sentence-length, conjunctions, pronouns and function words.The translated and original Chinese texts both demonstrate significant effects diachronically in standard type/token ratio and average segmental sentence-length, but demonstrate heterogeneous characteristics in the diachronic change of average sentence length, and occurrences of conjunction words and function words.2) In the diachronic study, the three original corpora demonstrate significant effect in standard type/token ratio, average sentence length, average segmental sentence-length, conjunctions and function words.3) In some particular periods, the register features in translated texts might spread into the original Chinese texts after taking some time.In addition, the correlation of translated Chinese texts and original Chinese texts in the frequencies of the chosen indicators in this paper changed historically.It is argued that the extent of interference from translated language is varied in different stages, and the potential factors are investigated accordingly.