An empirical study of the directionality of Chinese idioms translation based on corpus

Abstract

This paper reports an empirical study of Spanish translation of Chinese idioms, focusing on the similarities and differences between translation into one’s native language and non-native language. In this study, six Chinese modern literary works and their Spanish translations are used as the analysis object. Through the study of self-built small corpus and mathematical quantitative statistics, this paper reveals the similarities and differences between Spanish and Chinese translators’ works in terms of translation strategies, translation methods and language form parameters. The results show the relationship between translation direction and translation strategies and methods, and present the statistical laws among various linguistic formal parameters. We have achieved an empirical complement to translation directionality studies.