Corpus Linguistics approaches to trainee translators' framing practice in news translation

This article presents an empirical linguistic case study of seven Chinese(1) trainee translators' framing practice, focusing on how they reconstructed key lexical concepts in an English-to-Chinese news translation task. The research aim was to demonstrate how frames conceptualized in Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982) rationally serve as analytical and interpretive units of meaning, which contributes to providing a structural description and sufficient interpretation of translational discourse. The findings suggest that frames as context-motivated knowledge structures are crucial units of meaning to interrogate both source texts and translated texts in translation practice. This study has implications in translation training concerning how knowledge of frame application enters into training practice for source text interpretation and target text production.