McEnery and Xiao (2002), on the basis of a specialised English-Chinese parallel corpus of healthcare, found that the ratio of overt/covert marking of aspectual meanings was exceptionally low in Chinese translations. As Chinese is recognised as an aspect language (cf. Xiao & McEnery, 2004a), the authors hypothesised that the low frequency of aspect markers was atypical of the target L1 language and was attributable to the translated nature of the data in this case. To test this hypothesis, they constructed a comparable L1 Chinese corpus using the same sampling frame and compared the frequencies of two well established perfective aspect markers in the two data sets, namely, the translated Chinese and L1 Chinese. The experiment showed that in the translated Chinese, the two aspect markers occurred 27.32 times per 10,000 words whereas they occurred 62.33 times per 10,000 words in the comparable L1 Chinese data. Across-tabulation between the word numbers and actual frequency counts showed a log-likelihood ration of 49.1 for 2 degrees of freedom, which is statistically significant at the level p>0.001. Therefore, the authors' null hypothesis that the difference in frequencies of aspect markers in the two datasets existed by chance was rejected and they were able to claim that translated Chinese is indeed different from L1 Chinese in terms of aspect marking.
The above studies show that translated language is translationese. The effect of source language on the translations is strong enough to make the L2 data perceptibly different from the target L1 Chinese. As such, a unidirectional parallel corpus is a poor basis for cross-linguistic contrast. This problem, however, can be alleviated by a bidirectional parallel corpus (e.g. Ebeling, 1998; Maia, 1998), because the effect of translationese is averaged out to some extent. In this sense, a well matched bidirectional parallel corpus can become the bridge that brings translation and contrastive studies together. To achieve this aim, however, the same sampling frame must apply to the selection of source data in both languages. Any mismatch of proportion, genre or domain, for example, may invalidate the findings derived from such a corpus.
While we know that translated language is distinct from the target L1 language, it has been claimed recently that parallel corpora represent a sound basis for contrastive studies. James (1980: 178), for example, argues that 'translation equivalence is the best available basis of comparison' while Santos (1996: i) claims that 'studies based on real translations are the only sound method for contrastive analysis'. Mauranen (2002: 166) also argues, though not as strongly as James and Santos, that translated language, in spite of its special features, 'is part of natural language in use, and should be treated accordingly', because languages 'influence each other in many ways other than through translation' (Mauranen, 2002: 165).
While we agree with Mauranen that 'translations deserve to be investigated in their own right', as is done in Laviosa (1998b) and McEnery and Xiao (2002), we hold a different view of the value of parallel corpora for contrastive studies. It is true that languages in contact can influence each other, but this influence is different from the influence of a source language on translations with regard to immediacy and scope. Basically, the influence of languages in contact is generally gradual (or evolutionary) and less systematic than the influence of a source language on the translated language. As such, translated language is at best an unrepresentative special variant of the target language. If this special variant is confused with the target L1 language and serves alone as the basis for contrastive studies, the results are clearly misleading to teachers and students of second languages, because contrastive studies are 'typically geared towards second language teaching and learning' (Teich, 2002: 188). Using parallel corpora alone, for example, McEnery and Xiao (2002) would have come to the misleading conclusion that aspect markers occurred only infrequently in Chinese. As Chinese, as an aspect language, relies heavily on aspect to encode temporal information, which is different from English, which encodes both tense and aspect, this false conclusion would inevitably have an adverse effect on materials produced for Chinese learners of English. Parallel corpora can serve as a useful starting point for cross-linguistic contrasts because findings based on parallel corpora invite 'further research with monolingual corpora in both languages' (Mauranen, 2002: 182). In this sense, parallel corpora are 'indispensable' to contrastive studies (Mauranen, 2002: 182).
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