We employ psycholinguistic and experimental approaches, along with corpus methods utilizing syntactic treebanks and dependency grammar, to investigate the process and output of translations, with a specific focus on translational language syntax. Below, I provide an overview of my recent thoughts concerning translations and translational syntax.

The journey began with our exploration of relative clauses. For an in-depth look at my processing studies on relative clauses, I invite you to visit my publication page, where you will find a series of studies dedicated to Chinese relative clause processing. The disparities between relative clauses in Chinese and English piqued my interest in how conveying the same ideas and structures can involve distinct processing demands, largely driven by differences in the linearization of syntactic structures. This, in turn, leads to crosslinguistic variations. There are at least three critical factors to consider when contrasting Chinese and English relative clauses, which are often considered structural equivalents (a notion we have challenged in some of our works).

First, we acknowledge that the universal feature of relativization lies in the fact that the clausal modifier is embedded inside an NP, where the head noun being modified occupies an empty argument slot within the embedded clause.

Second, typologically, the head position in relation to relative clauses differs in the two languages. Chinese exhibits a left-branching (head-final) structure, while English is right-branching (head-initial). This distinction in linearization between the two languages has significant implications for head-dependent relations.

Third, in Chinese, all modifiers within noun phrases appear before the noun, whereas in English, noun phrase modifiers follow a mixed pattern. Adjectives precede nouns, but relative clauses come after the nouns.

Fourth, relative clauses in both Chinese and English serve both restrictive and non-restrictive functions, but the ways these two functions are encoded do not align perfectly between the two languages and can be somewhat challenging to pinpoint. English non-restrictive structures do not have direct equivalents in Chinese non-restrictive relative clauses. This discrepancy also suggests that the relativizer or linker may serve different functions in the two languages.

Fifth, all of the above complexities are further compounded by typological features such as pro-drop and topic-prominence, especially concerning the extensive use of topic-comment structures in Chinese. Identifying translational equivalents and mismatches, and deciphering how these choices are made, constitutes the core of our research on translational syntax.

We have extensively investigated all these aspects through psycholinguistic methods and corpus analysis. My research group has been actively involved in the creation of the first translational Chinese treebank, which compiles translational Chinese from two different genres—news and fiction. If you have an interest in this line of research within my group, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

© 2024. Cite this page as: Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2024). Translational Syntax: Psycholinguistic and Corpus Approaches. Indiana University Bloomington. URL: https://sites.google.com/view/chienjerlin/translational-syntax.