ABSTRACT
What is a translation genre? How do translation genres differ from original language genres? How do systematic differences between original language genres and translational genres reveal translation as a highly purposed cross-cultural and cross-lingual activity? These are fundamental yet largely overlooked research questions in translation studies. The central purpose of this chapter is to investigate the development of textual genres in translation, using Chinese as an example. The corpus analysis shows that translational Chinese genres are distinctly different from the original English genres and the target Chinese genres. A range of textual and contextual factors are taken into consideration in an attempt to explain such differences.
