Simplification in translated Chinese: An entropy-based approach

• Published in: Lingua Vol. 275; p. 103364
• Main Authors: Liu, Kanglong, Liu, Zhongzhu, Lei, Lei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01-08-2022; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Chinese languages; Computational linguistics; Entropy; Linguistic complexity; POS forms; Simplified language; Syntactic complexity; Translation; Translation studies; Word forms; Translation; POS forms; Entropy; Word forms; Computational linguistics
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2022.103364

•The simplification universal hypothesis has not been fully supported.•Entropy was used to analyse the complexity between translated and native Chinese.•Translational Chinese tends to be simpler at the lexical level.•Such a finding was not obtained at the syntactic level.
For a long time, translation researchers, particularly those working in corpus-based translation studies, have held the presumption that translated texts tend to be simpler in lexical and syntactical features than non-translated native texts. Such claims have led to the formulation of the simplification universal hypothesis in translation studies. However, this line of research which focuses predominantly on the investigation of individual linguistic features has failed to provide sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of the simplification universal. To a large extent, the lack of global quantitative indicators for evaluating the complexity level of the translated and non-translated texts has hindered progress in this field. The current study, using entropy as an indicator, analysed the linguistic complexity between translated and native Chinese from the information-theoretical perspective. Our research found that translational Chinese tends to be simpler than its non-translated counterpart at the lexical level based on unigram entropy, but not the syntactic level based on part-of-speech entropy. Our study has confirmed the use of entropy as a reliable measure for lexical and syntactic complexity in the field of translation studies.