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Moving Target and Cross-Cultural Relocation

A Parallel Corpus-Based Investigation of Translation
a
SUN Yifeng
Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Abstract
Translation entails cross-cultural relocation, revealing infinite complications and
complexities. While it has become something of commonplace among translation
scholars to view translation not only as a linguistic but also as a cultural transfer, this
paper questions the term of cultural transfer, which is often used indiscriminately, by
referring principally to a specially designed Chinese-English bilingual parallel corpus. The
data of some Chinese original and translated excerpts in English obtained from the
corpus are examined to ascertain whether a parallel corpus-based investigation of
translation can sufficiently explain the multifaceted nature and variability of the
obtained data. Under parallel linguistic and cultural circumstances, a comparative and
contrastive study of corpus data is plainly useful, but a holistic perspective on and
cultural-performatory approach to understanding translation will also be needed to help
address the limitations of some corpus-based studies of translation in merely proving
the obvious. It is thus important to emphasize that cross-cultural relocation is not a
static process but a dynamic and possibly also a continuous one, involving repeated

re-contextualization and discursive interaction in relation to translation as a moving

target.