ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the distinctive features of Chinese translators’ use of English collocations in terms of general collocation density and collocation distribution by comparing the two corpora: Native English Corpus of Commercial Discourse (NECCD) and Translational English Corpus of Commercial Translation from Chinese (TECCTC). In terms of overall frequency, native speakers of English in the NECCD produced 101,935 collocations, while Chinese translators produced 111,450 collocations in the TECCTC. This finding appears to show that Chinese translators may be using some collocations repeatedly, while native speakers may be using a diverse range of collocations. The chapter investigates the factors contributing to Chinese translators’ production of fewer collocation types from the lexical perspective. These factors can also be analysed in terms of lexical coverage and keyword growth. The chapter shows that, when compared with native speakers of English, the outputs by Chinese translators show a significant dependence on high-frequency strong collocations.
