I Want to Be Good: Translator Style Keyword List for Chinese Children's Literature

A 68.8 KB Excel file containing keyword lists from a bilingual corpus of 398,531 words. The dataset supports a study analyzing translator Nicky Harman's style in rendering Huang Beijia's Chinese children's novels 'I Want to Be Good' (1996) and 'Flight of the Bumblebee' (2018) into English. It was created by He He and last updated on June 2, 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyzing lexical patterns and translator's style based on keyword lists mentioned in the description.
• Investigating the balance of domestication and foreignization in translating Chinese idioms as described.
• Studying the use of contracted forms and specific collocations in translated children's literature.
• Conducting mixed-methods research integrating quantitative keyword analysis with qualitative close reading.

Strengths

• Dataset is derived from a self-built bilingual corpus totaling 398,531 words.
• Focuses on two specific, well-defined novels translated by a single translator, allowing for controlled stylistic analysis.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The 68.8 KB size indicates a very limited scope, likely containing only processed keyword lists rather than the full corpus.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Created from a self-built bilingual parallel and comparable corpus as part of a research study.

Time Range

Covers source novels from 1996 and 2018, with English translations published in 2020 and 2023.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-02 17:38:36; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Focuses on Chinese source texts translated for English readers.