Lexical Features in the Portuguese Translations of Contemporary Political Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Authors

  • Wenying Luo

    School of European Languages and Cultures, South China Business College of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510545, China

    Department of Portuguese, University of Macau, Macao SAR 519000, China
  • Xiang Zhang

    Faculty of Languages and Translation, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao SAR 999078, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i8.10785
Received: 28 June 2025 | Revised: 8 July 2025 | Accepted: 15 July 2025 | Published Online: 19 August 2025

Abstract

The characteristics of translations result not only from the interaction between linguistic systems but also from inherent elements of the translated text. This study emphasizes the empirical analysis of translation within the Sino-Portuguese translation context, specifically focusing on contemporary political discourse. The objective of this research is to examine the lexical features in the Portuguese translation of representative contemporary political texts through a comparable Sino-Portuguese corpus. The corpus comprises source texts in Chinese and their corresponding Portuguese translations, totaling 127,071 tokens in Chinese, 204,064 in Portuguese, and a reference corpus with original political texts (185,959 tokens). The comparative analysis revealed distinct lexical differences and translation strategies. A reduction in lexical richness was observed in the Portuguese translation compared to the original Chinese text, suggesting a post-translation simplification, alongside a higher lexical density in the Chinese version. The presence of connectors was more noticeable in the translation, adapting logical relations from Chinese. Nominalized structures prevailed in the Portuguese translation, while the Chinese version emphasized verbs. Chinese modal verbs were systematically replaced with diverse grammatical resources in the Portuguese translation, avoiding repetitions and conforming to the language's conventions. Finally, translating institutional discourse necessitates a balance between semantic preservation and typological conformity, with implications for translator training and the analysis of transcultural discourses.

Keywords:

Chinese-Portuguese Translation; Lexical Features; Corpus; Political Discourse Translation

References

[1] Baker, M., 1993. Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications. In: Baker, M., Francis, G., Tognini-Bonelli, E. (eds.). Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 233–250. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/z.64.15bak

[2] Baker, M., 1999. The role of corpora in investigating the linguistic behaviour of professional translators. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 4(2), 281–298. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.4.2.05bak

[3] Baker, M., 1995. Corpora in translation studies: an overview and some suggestions for future research. International Journal of Translation Studies. 7(2), 223–243. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/target.7.2.03bak

[4] Laviosa, S., 1998. Corpus-based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications. In: Brill: Leiden, Netherlands. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004485907_005

[5] Kenny, D., 2001. Lexis and Creativity in Translation: A Corpus-based Study. St. Jerome Publishing: Manchester, UK.

[6] Baker, M., Somers, H., 1996. Corpus-based translation studies: the challenges that lie ahead. In: Somers, H. (ed.). Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, Vol. 18. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 175–186. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.18.17bak

[7] Dayrell, C., 2015. The use of corpora for translation studies. Translation Journal. 2022(34). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17771/pucrio.tradrev.25346 (in Portuguese)

[8] Dayrell, C., 2007. A quantitative approach to compare collocational patterns in translated and non‑translated texts. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 12(3), 375–414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.3.04day

[9] Wang, T., Leal, A., 2020. The use of parallel corpora as a resource in computer-assisted translation: A case study of Portuguese-Chinese judicial sentence translation. Letters Today. 55(4). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2020.4.38339 (in Portuguese)

[10] Hu, Z.H., Wang, S.Y., 2023. On the Translation of the Chinese "Bu (Mei) + Verb" Structure into Portuguese Based on a Chinese-Portuguese Parallel Corpus. Translation Notebooks. 43(3), 233–271. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2023.e87041 (in Portuguese)

[11] Hu, X.Y., 2007. A Corpus-Based Study of Lexical Features in Translated Chinese Fiction. Foreign Language Teaching and Research. 39(3), 214–220. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1000-0429.2007.03.008 (in Chinese)

[12] Tian, L., Wong, D.F., Chao, L.S., et al., 2014. UM‑Corpus: a large English‑Chinese parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Reykjavik, Iceland, May 2014; pp. 1837–1842.

[13] Fleuri, L., Vasconcellos, M.L., Pagano, A., 2009. The Representation of the "Translator" Participant in Translators Through History and Os Tradutores na História. Translation Notebooks. 2(24), 159–191. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2009v2n24p159 (in Portuguese)

[14] Cruz, L.P.R., 2014. A Study on the Translation of Specialized Collocations in the Export and Agribusiness Sectors Based on a Parallel Corpus [Master's thesis]. São Paulo State University: São José do Rio Preto, Brazil. p. 142. (in Portuguese)

[15] Zidan, B.A., Yagi, S.M., 2025. A parallel corpus analysis of the pragmatic marker “I think”. Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 15(3), 706–715. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1503.05

[16] Nunes, L.P., 2020. Cohesive devices in the Portuguese Language Corpus in Translation: Investigating conjunctions in a contrastive perspective within a text typology. Journal of Language Studies. 28(1), 13–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.28.1.13-40 (in Portuguese)

[17] Chen, J.S., Cui, Y.N., 2010. A Corpus-Based Study of Lexical Features in the English Translation of China's "Government Work Report". Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies. (6), 6. (in Chinese)

[18] Yu, H., 2016. A Corpus-Based Investigation of the "Simplification" Trend in Government Document Translation: A Case Study of the English Version of the White Paper "China's National Defense in 2010". Foreign Languages Research. 33(3), 79–86. (in Chinese)

[19] Li, T., Pan, F., 2021. Reshaping China's image: a corpus-based analysis of the English translation of Chinese political discourse. Perspectives. 29(3), 354–370. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2020.1727540

[20] Huang, L., 2008. Explicitation of Subject Personal Pronouns in English-Chinese Translation: A Corpus-Based Study. Foreign Language Teaching and Research. 40(6), 454–459. (in Chinese)

[21] Pan, F., Fu, Y., Li, T., 2024. Institutional translators' mediation of CPC Work Reports diachronically through personal pronouns: a corpus-based discourse analysis approach. Perspectives Studies in Translatology. 32(5), 924–941. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2023.2194548

[22] Xu, J., 2023. Research methods in corpus linguistics. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press: Beijing, China.

[23] Scott, M., 1998. Manual of Wordsmith (version 3). Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

[24] Neves, M.H.D.M., 2000. The Polysemy of Modal Verbs. Or: On Ambiguities. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/107772 (cited 10 March 2025). (in Portuguese)

[25] Raeisi, M., Dastjerdi, H.V., 2019. Lexico-grammatical analysis of native and nonnative abstracts based on Halliday's SFL model. Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 9(11), 1388–1395. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0911.03

Downloads

How to Cite

Luo, W., & Zhang, X. (2025). Lexical Features in the Portuguese Translations of Contemporary Political Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(8), 938–948. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i8.10785

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 8 (August 2025): In progress

Article Type

Article

License

Copyright © 2025 Wenying Luo, Xiang Zhang

Creative Commons License

This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.