Translation Style and Ideology: a Corpus-assisted Analysis of two English Translations of Hongloumeng
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hongloumeng by Xueqin Cao (Hsueh-ch‘in Ts'ao) is generally considered one of the greatest classical Chinese novel. Of all nine published English translations known today, the one translated by Hawkes and Minford (the Story of the Stone, Penguin, 1973–86) and the other by Yang and Yang (A Dream of Red Mansions1, Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, 1978–80) are the best known among translators and literary scholars. Over the years, both have been carefully scrutinized and much critiqued. Translators and translation scholars have been engaged in heated debates over salient features of the translations, strategies employed by the translators, the possible effects of the two translations and so on [cf. Liu and Gu (1997) On translation of cultural contents in Hong Lou Meng [in Chinese]. Chinese Translators Journal, 1: 16–19; Wang (2001) A Comparative Study of the English Translations of Poetry in Hong Lou Meng. Xi’an: Shanxi Normal University Press; Feng (2006) On the Translation of Hong Lou Meng [in Chinese]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press; Liu (2008), Translating tenor: With reference to the English versions of Hong Lou Meng. Meta, 53(3): 528–48], with the eventual aim to determine which translation better captures the style of the original text or author. Like many debates of similar nature, no definitive conclusions have been reached despite such an intense interest. We believe a corpus-assisted examination [Baker, M. (2000). Towards a methodology for investigating the style of a literary translator. Target, 12(2): 241–66; Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In Gill, F., Baker, M., and Tognini-Bonelli, E. (eds), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 233–50] of the two translations will provide more convincing analysis and can better describe the differences in the translation style of the two famous translations. A particular effort is further made to interpret the reasons for the different strategies adopted by the two different pairs of translators in the social, political, and ideological context of the translations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".