I Want to Be Good: Bilingual Corpus for Translator Style Analysis

A 398,531-word bilingual corpus supports a study of translator Nicky Harman's style in rendering contemporary Chinese children's novels into English. The dataset, created by He He, enables mixed-methods analysis of lexical, syntactic, and textual choices in translations published between 2020 and 2023. It includes parallel and comparable texts for quantitative keyword analysis and qualitative close reading.

Use Cases

• Analyzing translator's lexical preferences based on keyword analysis and collocation patterns mentioned in the description
• Studying syntactic style in translated children's literature based on the use of contracted forms and readability metrics
• Investigating strategies for translating Chinese idioms based on the described balance of domestication and foreignization
• Examining multimodal interaction in translated texts based on the described consideration for young readership

Strengths

• Corpus totals 398,531 words, providing a substantial textual basis for analysis
• Includes both parallel and comparable text alignments for methodological flexibility
• Focuses on two distinct novels (1996, 2018) translated by a single professional (2020, 2023) for controlled comparison
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license for reuse

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are absent, requiring manual inspection after download
• The 214.5 KB file size suggests a limited, word-list focused scope rather than full texts
• Data may reflect the specific stylistic bias of a single translator and two source novels

Provenance

Source

figshare, author He He

Collection Method

Self-built bilingual corpus from translated novels by Nicky Harman

Time Range

Source novels from 1996 and 2018; translations published 2020 and 2023

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-02 17:38:35