A corpus-based investigation of the English translations of Mao Zedong’s speeches

ABSTRACT: This study adopts a corpus-based approach to examine the linguistic features manifested in the English translations of Mao Zedong’s speeches, taking Winston Churchill’s speeches (representative of normalized spoken texts) and the spoken texts in BNC Sampler (representative of original spoken texts) as the reference corpora. By investigating the macro- and micro-linguistic features, it is found that the translated Mao’s speeches (both direct and inverse translations) differ from normalized spoken texts as well as original spoken texts in three aspects: (i) macro-linguistic features, (ii) the use of personal pronouns, (iii) the use of modal verbs. In terms of macro-linguistic features, the average word length of the English translations is higher than that of normalized spoken texts and that

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PROVIDER: S-EPMC9731272 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature