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Time in Languages, Languages in Time
Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 101] 2021
► pp. 95–128

Translating verbal tenses between tensed and tenseless languages

A contrastive study of multilingual corpora

| University of Geneva
| Sun Yat-sen University

In this chapter, we investigate how verbal tenses are translated into a tenseless language (Chinese) and whether the translation of temporal information from a tenseless language into tensed languages (English and French) is influenced by the formal structure of the source language. The results of our corpus analysis show that English and French verbal tenses like the Present Perfect and Imparfait are not systematically translated into Mandarin using an aspectual marker. We find that present-time French and English verbal tenses are most often translated into Mandarin using non-marked VPs, past-time verbal tenses using aspectual, temporal markers and linguistically non-marked VPs, and future-time verbal tenses using temporal markers. These patterns also apply for the translation of Mandarin VPs into French and English.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tense and grammatical aspect from a cross-linguistic perspective
    • 2.1English Simple Past, Past Progressive and Present Perfect
    • 2.1French Passé Composé, Passé Simple and Imparfait
    • 2.3Expressing time and the role of (grammatical) aspect in Mandarin
  • 3.Empirical study
    • 3.1Hypotheses and predictions
    • 3.2Corpora, coding system and analysis
    • 3.3Results
      • 3.3.1Frequencies of verbal tenses in French and in English
      • 3.3.2Frequencies of aspectual markers in Mandarin
      • 3.3.3Translation of verbal tenses from English and French into Mandarin
      • 3.3.4Translation of verb phrases from Mandarin into English and French
    • 3.4Discussion of the results
      • 3.4.1Frequencies of verbal tenses in English and French
      • 3.4.2Frequencies of aspectual markers in Mandarin
      • 3.4.3Translation of English and French verbal tenses into Mandarin
      • 3.4.4Translation of Mandarin verb phrases into English and French
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.101.05gri
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