A comparative study of syntactic features of translated language and original language: a case study of Chinese and Russian novels

the translated language differs from the source and target languages and is called the 'third code', possessing unique characteristics. In this article, using four classical works from China and Russia as examples, a comparative analysis of 13 indicators is carried out to study the linguistic features of the original Chinese, translated Chinese, original Russian and translated Russian languages. The results show that at the lexical level: 1) at the sentence level, the average dependency distance in the translated language is greater than in the original; 2) at the phrase level, the differences in the average phrase length and the number of phrases per sentence between the translated and original languages are more noticeable, the common features are less pronounced; 3) at the collocation level, the proportion of binary, trinary and low-frequency collocations in the original language is higher than in the translated language. The study shows that the translated language, when subjected to human processing, has syntactic features that are different from the original language.

language features, comparison, translation language, original language, quantitative analysis, four great works of Chinese literature, quantitative analysis