Response Letter to the Editors’ and Reviewers’ Comments

Date: 23 June 2026

Manuscript Number: PONE-D-26-21657

Manuscript Title: Does language prestige hypothesis hold true across typologically distant languages? A corpus-based study comparing shining-through effect in English-Chinese bidirectional translations

Dear Editors and Reviewers,

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the opportunity to submit a revised version of our manuscript titled “Does language prestige hypothesis hold true across typologically distant languages? A corpus-based study comparing shining-through effect in English-Chinese bidirectional translations” to PLOS ONE. We are deeply grateful for the time and effort invested by you and the reviewers in providing thoughtful feedback and constructive suggestions. These have been instrumental in helping us refine and strengthen our work.

In response to the reviewers’ suggestions and editorial guidance, we have made the following key revisions:

a. Strengthened the theoretical framing by clarifying the conceptualisation of key constructs, including language prestige and typological distance;

b. Enhanced methodological transparency and reproducibility by providing more detailed descriptions of feature selection, data preprocessing, FDA implementation, hyperparameter tuning, cross-validation procedures, model validation and statistical reporting;

c. Improved the interpretation of multivariate analyses by distinguishing more explicitly between statistical patterns and theoretical explanations;

d. Expanded the discussion of limitations and scope conditions.

We believe that these revisions have substantially improved the clarity, methodological rigor, theoretical precision and transparency of the manuscript. The revised version provides a more explicit account of the analytical procedures, a more carefully qualified interpretation of the findings, and a clearer distinction between empirical evidence and theoretical inference. As a result, the study offers a more robust and nuanced contribution to corpus-based translation studies and to ongoing discussions concerning source language shining through, language prestige and typological differences in translation. We hope that the revised manuscript now meets the expectations of the journal and we sincerely appreciate your consideration.

In accordance with the instructions outlined in your letter dated 6 June 2026, we have uploaded both a clean version of the revised manuscript and a marked-up version with all changes highlighted in dark blue using MS Word.

Please find enclosed our point-by-point response to the editors’ and reviewers’ comments. Each comment is numbered and reproduced in italicised red font. Our responses follow immediately in purple font, with corresponding excerpts from the revised manuscript presented in dark blue.

Thank you once again for your valuable feedback and continued consideration of our work.

Yours sincerely,

Author(s)

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Comments from the Editorial Office

Comment 1

Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements, including those for file naming.

Response:

Thanks for highlighting this issue. We have carefully reviewed the PLOS ONE style templates provided and revised the manuscript accordingly to ensure full compliance with the journal’s formatting requirements, including file naming conventions, heading styles and reference formatting.

Comment 2

Please note that PLOS One has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work.

Response:

Thanks for pointing out this issue. We have reviewed the PLOS ONE guidelines on code sharing. All author-generated R code underlying the analyses reported in this manuscript has been made publicly available without restrictions. The code has been deposited at OSF: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/205YXZ and is fully documented to facilitate reproducibility and reuse. A reference to this repository has been included in the section of data availability revised manuscript. Please note that the repository link provided is currently restricted to peer-review access and will be replaced with a publicly accessible version upon acceptance.

Comment 3

Please ensure that you include a title page within your main document. You should list all authors and all affiliations as per our author instructions and clearly indicate the corresponding author.

Response:

Thanks for this comment. A title page has been included within the main document. It lists all authors, their respective affiliations and clearly indicates the corresponding author, in accordance with PLOS ONE author instructions.

Comment 4

In the online submission form you indicate that your data is not available for proprietary reasons and have provided a contact point for accessing this data. Please note that your current contact point is a co-author on this manuscript. According to our Data Policy, the contact point must not be an author on the manuscript and must be an institutional contact, ideally not an individual. Please revise your data statement to a non-author institutional point of contact, such as a data access or ethics committee, and send this to us via return email. Please also include contact information for the third party organization, and please include the full citation of where the data can be found.

Response:

We thank the editorial team for drawing our attention to this issue. We acknowledge that the original contact point listed was a co-author, which does not comply with PLOS ONE’s Data Policy. We have revised the Data Availability Statement accordingly. The data underlying this study are openly accessible in the OSF repository. Below is the revised Data availability statement:

The datasets generated by the research during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the OSF repository, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/205YXZ

Please note that the repository link provided is currently restricted to peer-review access and will be replaced with a publicly accessible version upon acceptance.

Comment 5

We notice that your supplementary figures are uploaded with the file type ‘Figure’. Please amend the file type to ‘Supporting Information’. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list.

Response:

Thank you for pointing out this issue. Upon reflection, we have decided to incorporate the supplementary figures directly into the main text as numbered figures, rather than retaining them as supporting information files. The figures have been repositioned and renumbered accordingly within the manuscript, and the corresponding in-text citations and captions have been updated to reflect this change.

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Comments from Reviewer #1:

The manuscript addresses an important and theoretically interesting question concerning the interaction of language prestige, typological distance, and source-language shining-through in English-Chinese bidirectional translation. The use of a bidirectional parallel corpus and a multivariate analytical framework represents a valuable contribution to translation studies. The study presents substantial evidence that shining-through effects occur in both translation directions and that these effects vary across registers. The corpus design and the effort to identify cross-linguistically comparable features are commendable. However, several important issues require clarification and revision before the manuscript can be considered for publication.

Response:

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the time and effort you dedicated to evaluating the initial version of our manuscript. We are deeply appreciative of your thorough and professional review, as well as your insightful suggestions for improvement, with which we fully agree. In light of your comments, we have substantially revised the manuscript to enhance its conceptual grounding, methodological transparency and analytical precision. The main revisions and additions are summarised as follows:

a. Strengthened the theoretical framing by clarifying the conceptualisation of key constructs, including language prestige and source language shining through, and by carefully qualifying claims concerning typological distance, translation universals and causal interpretations.

b. Enhanced methodological transparency and reproducibility by providing more detailed descriptions of feature selection, data preprocessing, FDA implementation, hyperparameter tuning, cross-validation procedures, model validation and statistical reporting.

c. Improved the interpretation of multivariate analyses by distinguishing more explicitly between statistical patterns and theoretical explanations.

d. Expanded the discussion of limitations and scope conditions, including translator variability, register-specific effects, corpus-related constraints and the generalisability of the findings beyond the PCCE corpus and the English–Chinese language pair.

Concerning your specific comments, we have numbered and quoted them in italicised red font. Our responses follow each comment in purple font, with modifications and additions from the manuscript presented in dark blue font below our responses.

Comment 1:

The most significant concern is the claim that typological distance moderates the relationship between language prestige and shining-through. This moderation effect is not directly tested; instead, the argument is inferred through comparison with previous studies involving different language pairs. At present, the findings demonstrate directional differences in shining-through effects, but they do not permit a direct test of whether typological distance moderates the relationship between language prestige and source-language influence. The manuscript should either provide stronger evidence supporting this moderation claim or substantially soften and reframe it as a theoretical interpretation.

Response:

Thank you for this insightful comment. We agree that the original wording overstated the evidential basis for the moderation claim. As you correctly note, the present study does not directly test whether typological distance moderates the relationship between language prestige and source language shining through. Rather, this interpretation was inferred from comparisons between our findings and those reported in previous studies involving different language pairs.

We considered the possibility of incorporating additional language pairs into the analysis; however, comparable bidirectional corpora were not available for a systematic cross-linguistic investigation. We therefore agree that the available evidence is insufficient to support a direct moderation claim.

To address this concern, we have carefully revised the relevant sections of the manuscript by substantially softening the original wording and reframing the argument as a theoretical interpretation rather than an empirically demonstrated effect. The revised text now presents typological distance as a plausible explanatory factor that may help account for variation in the strength of shining-through across language pairs, while explicitly acknowledging that a direct test of this proposition would require future research involving multiple language pairs and a more appropriate comparative design. Examples of the revision are provided below:

[Lines 35-40, Page 1]

A comparison with findings from studies involving typologically closer language pairs further suggests that typological distance may help explain variation in the influence of language prestige on source language shining through. Specifically, the prestige effect appears to be weaker when the source and target languages are typologically more distant, although this interpretation requires direct empirical testing in future research.

[Lines 909-929, Pages 45-46]

However, a comparison with the findings of Evert and Neumann [8] suggests a potentially interesting contrast: whereas the language prestige effect might be expected to produce an even stronger shining-through effect in English-to-Chinese translation than that observed for the typologically closer English-German pair, the present results do not indicate a comparatively stronger effect for Chinese. One possible, and admittedly speculative, interpretation is that the substantial typological distance between Chinese and English may attenuate the prestige effect to some extent, such that typological distance could act as a moderating factor in the relationship between language prestige and shining-through. More specifically, in the translation direction from a high-status language to a low-status one, the prestige effect is more likely to manifest when the source and target languages are typologically similar. However, when the source and target languages are typologically different, the prestige effect is likely to be relatively diminished. It should be emphasised, however, that this moderation is not directly tested in the present study. The present design does not include a typologically closer language pair for comparison within the same analytical framework, and the observation is based on a comparison across studies that differ in corpora, operationalisations and methods. As such, this interpretation should be regarded as a theoretically motivated hypothesis for future research, rather than as direct empirical evidence of a moderating effect.

[Lines 979-988, Page 48]

Firstly, while this study provides new evidence broadly consistent with the language prestige hypothesis and the risk-aversion hypothesis, it also raises the possibility, based on comparisons with previous studies involving typologically closer language pairs, that typological distance may influence the extent to which language prestige is reflected in source language shining through. Because this possibility was not directly tested in the present study, it should be regarded as a theoretical interpretation rather than an empirically established finding. Nevertheless, it points to a potentially fruitful direction for future research on the interaction between linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in translation.

Comment 2:

A second concern involves the operationalization of language prestige. The study assumes English functions as a more prestigious language and Chinese as a less prestigious one within the proposed framework, but prestige is not formally defined or measured. Greater theoretical justification is needed. In particular, it would be useful to clarify whether prestige is treated as an assumed sociolinguistic property of the language pair or as an empirically measurable construct.

Response:

Thank you for highlighting this important issue. We agree that the original manuscript did not provide sufficient justification for treating English as a language of higher global prestige and Chinese as a language of comparatively lower global prestige within the proposed framework.

To address this concern, we have substantially expanded the theoretical discussion of language prestige and clarified how the construct is operationalised in the present study. Specifically, language prestige is not treated as a variable that is directly measured in our dataset. Rather, it is conceptualised as a sociolinguistic property established in previous scholarship on global language hierarchies, language diffusion, and international communicative influence. In this sense, prestige is employed as a theoretically motivated explanatory construct rather than an empirically measured variable in the current analysis.

We consulted relevant studies on language prestige and the global status of English and Chinese. These studies suggest that, although Chinese has experienced a significant increase in international influence, English continues to occupy a dominant position in global communication, education, sci

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