Exploring the linguistic shift between English Nominalization and Chinese Verbalization through corpus-based analysis.
The Nominalization–Verb Atlas (NV Atlas) is a digital humanities initiative tailored to support translators, linguists, translation teachers, and students in grasping the structural divergences between English and Chinese.
English is often characterized as a "noun-heavy" language, frequently utilizing nominalization (turning verbs or adjectives into nouns) to condense information. In contrast, Chinese is often described as "verb-heavy" or dynamic. This project maps how English nominals (e.g., "implementation," "development") are translated into Chinese, revealing patterns where nouns revert to verbs.
Our dataset is derived from the OpenSubtitles v2024 corpus. This is a collection of translated movie subtitles sourced from https://www.opensubtitles.org/.
We utilize this specific corpus because it offers:
Currently, the NV Atlas database contains the following records extracted and processed from the source corpus:
The data processing pipeline employs a hybrid approach, combining Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging (via nltk and Jieba) and a local AI model (Google's gemma 3) with human inspection to cultivate the data and accurately identify Nominalization-to-Verb (N-V) shifts within these subtitles.
This project is hosted by the Department of Translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
We gratefully acknowledge the funding support from the Faculty of Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. This research is conducted under the project title English Nominalization and Chinese Verbal Usage in Translation: A Corpus-Based Study (Company Code: C001; Project Code: 4051274).
This project utilizes data from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Please cite the following papers regarding the underlying data source:
This website was built with the assistance of AI (Gemini-3-Pro from poe.com, 10 January 2026 version).