Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language.

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language. Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language teachers Association (now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in the field of Chinese linguistics.

Although more people speak Chinese than any other language on Earth, proficiency in Chinese is largely confined to the people who live in or adjacent to the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan, and to the ethnic Chinese inhabitants of the various “Chinatowns” in countries around the world. Despite its allure, many people find Chinese a hard language to learn, including a considerable number of children who learn it as mother tongue.

This volume provides a timely reflection of this growing interdisciplinary field of translation, interpreting and political discourse. It includes very recent work carried out by researchers from a range of countries. The chapters illustrate new trends and perspectives in the interdisciplinary research field, and extends previous research. The volume covers both translation and interpreting modes in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual contexts. It features the convergences and synergies between the two modes, and thus provides new insights on these different modes of language communication. Furthermore, instead of situating translation in politics or politics in translation, the volume treats political discourse and translation/interpreting at equal levels, thus allowing more room for the discussion of the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

Multi-Dimensional Analysis: Research Methods and Current Issues provides a comprehensive guide both to the statistical methods in Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) and its key elements, such as corpus building, tagging, and tools. The major goal is to explain the steps involved in the method so that readers may better understand this complex research framework and conduct MD research on their own. Multi-Dimensional Analysis is a method that allows the researcher to describe different registers (textual varieties defined by their social use) such as academic settings, regional discourse, social media, movies, and pop songs. Through multivariate statistical techniques, MDA identifies complementary correlation groupings of dozens of variables, including variables which belong both to the grammatical and semantic domains. Such groupings are then associated with situational variables of texts like information density, orality, and narrativity to determine linguistic constructs known as dimensions of variation, which provide a scale for the comparison of a large number of texts and registers. This book is a comprehensive research guide to MDA.

As culture and society has become more digitalized, especially when computer science and digital technologies have entered a new era in the twenty-first century, translation studies began to utilize a wide range of tools to enhance its reading of texts and contexts, without which translation both as a practice and as a theorization could barely persist. It has become more apparent that two extreme poles between macro and micro visions have formed the diversified terrains of translation studies. On the one hand, technologies like NLP, topic modeling, network analysis and data visualization make distant reading become possible, thus allowing us to have a paradigmatic view of how human’s ideas, beliefs, values, knowledge and even emotions have spread in some patterns across cultural, geographical and language divides in world history. On the other hand, corpus methods, such as the use of keywords, collocates and concordance lines changed the way by which texts were closely read from linear to vertical. With microscope like corpus tools, we could go deeper into the texture for perception of nuanced meaning. While considering a fact that translation is seldom mono modal in conveying meaning, we have to reconceptualize context as a multimodal environment where audio, visual and other resources interact to convey and make meaning. With regard to the fast development of digital technology, translation studies take an active role in gaining an enhanced capability in promoting transformation. Complexity has been favored in terms of theoretical framework and methodology. New questions are asked; old ones revisited with novel tools; but more areas wait to be cultivated and more questions to be approached by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We could ask if digital technologies would bring new innovation to study of translation history, a heavily-walled land for traditional humanists who tend to repeat “so-what” to question the less significance of data-driven studies. The idea of high-quality machine translation has become so realistic in today’s market that translation educators have to face the shock wave it brought to translation learners and practitioners and rethink the relation between human translators and algorithms. Machine-translation-assisted communication could help remove boundaries for better communication; but at the same time, it also creates conflicts and leads to confrontation. Thus understood, it is imperative to give a concerned attention to digital translation studies, that is, to study translation by resorting to and drawing on the digital technologies. This Research Topic is intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research. We welcome papers which, from a critical-analytical perspective, deal with contemporary social, scientific, political, economic, or professional discourses and genres. Papers addressing the highlighted topics are especially welcome. In giving weight to these topics, we wish to call to attention some of the most pressing problems currently facing the world.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 22nd Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2021, held in Nanjing, China in May 2021. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics and General Linguistics; Natural Language Processing and Language Computing; Cognitive Science and Experimental Studies; Lexical Resources and Corpus Linguistics.

The two-volume set LNAI 13495 and LNAI 13496, constitute the refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 23rd Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2022, held as a virtual event, during May 14-15, 2022. In total the two-volume set includes 39 full papers and 19 short papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 214 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: lexical semantics; corpus linguistics; general linguistics, lexical resources; computational linguistics, applications of natural language processing.

This collection brings together several perspectives on language varieties defined according to their contexts of use--what are variously called registers, sublanguages, or genres. The volume highlights the importance of these central linguistic phenomena; it includes empirical analyses and linguistic descriptions, as well as explanations for existing patterns of variation and proposals for theoretical frameworks. The book treats languages in obsolescence and in their youth; it examines registers from languages from around the globe; and it offers several of the most complete studies of registers and register variation published to date, adopting both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

This book introduces the latest advances in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS), a thriving subfield of Translation Studies which forms an important part of both translator training and empirical translation research. Largely empirical and exploratory, a distinctive feature of CBTS is the development and exploration of quantitative linguistic data in search of useful patterns of variation and change in translation. With the introduction of textual statistics to Translation Studies, CBTS has geared towards a new research direction that is more systematic in the identification of translation patterns; and more explanatory of any linguistic variations identified in translations. The book traces the advances from the advent of language corpora in translation studies, to the new textual dimensions and shift towards a probability-variation model. Such advances made in CBTS have enabled in-depth analyses of translation by establishing useful links between a translation and the social and cultural context in which the translation is produced, circulated and consumed.