Influence of translations on non-translations: popular science as a new genre in Taiwan

According to the polysystem theory (as described by Even-Zohar in 1990), translation tends to play a dominant role when the genre is new and young in the target system. This article discusses the genre of popular science as a new genre in Taiwan, and examines the potential influence of translations on non-translations. The Chinese edition of Scientific American published in Taiwan, which contains both translations from the English version and non-translations written by Taiwanese scientists, is used as the corpus. A reference corpus which represents the norm of the Chinese science writings is also included in the present study. The text analysis focuses particularly on the linguistic features that indicate how writers interact with the readers, including deixis, personal references, junction, and hedges. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are carried out to investigate the potential influence. Based on the data collected from the magazine, this study finally suggests that the translations...