This article investigates the role of translations from English in language change in Chinese. It employs a new
corpus, the Chinese Diachronic Composite Corpus (CDCC), which incorporates a parallel corpus and comparable corpus in three
sampling periods in the twentieth century, and a reference corpus as a starting point in the timeframe. We examine whether
explicitness in English–Chinese translations has exerted an impact on the target language, focusing on adversative conjunctions as
a measure of explicitness. The results of the study demonstrate that: (1) translated Chinese texts have changed in step with
original Chinese texts in the frequency of adversative conjunctions; (2) translated Chinese texts and original Chinese texts are
interrelated throughout the three periods, but the correlation between them has changed perceptibly over the three sample points;
and (3) source language interference found in translated Chinese texts increases over the three periods.
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