Are TERRORISM and kongbu zhuyi translation equivalents? A corpusbased investigation of meaning, structure and alternative translations

This paper reports an investigation using large scale corpora to contrast a pair of translation equivalents - TERRORISM in English and kongbù zhuyì in Chinese. Close similarities between the two words manifested in the lexical profile produced by Word Sketch, e.g., in terms of their top collocates and syntactic roles. However, we also observed notable differences between the two words - e.g., occurs far more frequently than TERRORISM in noun-noun constructions, in particular in the 'X+noun' construction (X=/TERRORISM). Based on evidence from the corpora, entails a relatively narrower range of semantic meaning than that of TERRORISM, and is more readily joined by another noun to convey more specific meaning. Given that the two words are not translation equivalents in certain situations, we identified a number of methods that effectively retrieved several lexical candidates from comparable corpora for alternative translations in these situations.