A Corpus-Based Research On Europeanized Translation

One of the natural and significant outcomes of language contact is the contact-induced language change in both sides, which mainly covers vocabulary and syntax, but sometimes they may also be spread to morpheme, phoneme, semantics, pragmatics, etc. When the changes happen in the Chinese language under the influence of English, they are usually called the "Europeanized Grammar", as the great Chinese grammarian Wang Li(王力,1985:460) has named it.In the past dozens of years, the English language, as one of the most powerful language in the present world, has caused series of prominent changes in the Modern Chinese. In other words, it has pushed the Chinese language into the stage of Europeanization. Actually, it helps to enrich and perfect the Chinese language as well as to enforce a deleterious effect on it. Unfortunately, the term "Europeanization", ever since its birth, seems to have always been bearing an unjustifiable negative color among academic opinions as well as public perceptions. Since the translation from English to Chinese is one of the most important means of indirect language contact in between and therefore is inevitably having a very close relationship to this fact, the English-Chinese translation has long been the target of criticism. Thus, a penetration to the research of the English-Chinese translation is of great importance and significance, not only for the cause of translation but also for a better understanding of the current Chinese language and its changes.The newly developed contact linguistics and corpus linguistics shed great light on translation studies these years, and they offer quite valuable clue and method to this research. With translatology at the core, this research looks into the problem through the perspective of language contact, makes full use of corpus linguistics, and carries out an empirical study on the so-called "Europeanized translation" appearing in the process of English-Chinese translation, so that systematic description and exploration can be given on the basis of these qualitative and quantitative studies. In addition, related fruits in the academic fields like historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, comparative linguistics, and Chinese studies all contribute to the present research. RESEARCH GOALSThis research intends to reach the following four goals:Firstly, with the help of corpora and questionnaires, this research tries to carry out a systematic investigation, statistical test, contrastive study and comprehensive analysis to the problem of Europeanized translation, so as to offer a full-scale quantitative evaluation and summarization to the status quo of this phenomenon, and help to form an all-round and reasonable understanding to it.Secondly, based on the above findings and theoretical analysis, this research offers a series of tentative norms to distinguish the acceptable and unacceptable Europeanization. Naturally, those that are in line with the norms are positive, whereas those that are not fall into the negative. Thus, Europeanized translation would no longer be regarded as solely negative and harmful. Instead, an objective and overall evaluation would be given, and that will serve for a rational attitude towards the practice of English-Chinese translation and the existing or future changes of the Chinese language.Thirdly, this research struggles to prove the existence of positive Europeanized translation and further explores their value and contribution to the development of the Chinese language as well as translation itself. In this way, it justifies the long-wronged Europeanized translation.Fourthly, it is also designed to summarize and explore the macroscopic and microscopic strategies to avoid or reduce negative Europeanization, so that the rules of their appearance and the optimizing approaches can be sought, the unacceptable parts of translation can be effectively improved, and in the long run, the abnormal development of the Chinese language will be avoided.OUTLINEThe whole research is composed of nine chapters, which falls into four basic parts, namely, research base, main body, extended research, and conclusion. The brief introduction is as follows: I. Research Base. It includes the first two chapters.Chapter 1 as the beginning of this research serves as a necessary preparation for the following work. It starts with the introduction of the research background, indicating that the research proposal is very meaningful, not only because the topic is fairly hot, but because the attitude towards the subject determines the future of the Chinese language as well as English-Chinese translation. Then, it gives a detailed discussion on related concepts and academic terms so that the author's ideas in the following chapters can be understood more thoroughly. It has also cultivated the theoretical and practical value of the research, pointed out the innovations from various angles, showed the research purpose, sketched the research process, and introduced the methods employed.Chapter 2 brings about a general and comprehensive review of the related literature resources, which falls into five categories, namely contact linguistics, standards and norms, corpus linguistics, the Chinese language, and English-Chinese translation studies. However, the last two fields overlap with each other so much that they have to be put together in order to have a clear clue of the academic contributions.Contact linguistics is put in the very beginning because the translation is one of the most important means of language contact, direct for translators and indirect for its receivers. The history of language contact is almost as old as languages, but the research on it comes rather late, and its application in translation studies is even as late as about one hundred years ago. The birth of Contact Linguistics both contributes to and challenges the related academic researches, including translation, especially Europeanized translation-at least it tells people that language may and will change with translation. According to Thomason and Kaufman (1991:74-76), the English-Chinese contact is somewhere near "more intense contact", although some of which may be just "covert" (Myers-Scotton,2002:10). What's more, numerous Chinese scholars today firmly believe that Europeanized translation is very much related with the influence of English and English-Chinese translation. Thus, theories of contact linguistics shall be of much value to the present research.The discussion of "standards" and "norms" are especially valuable as the concept of "norm" brings linguistics research from static to dynamic and from prescriptive to descriptive. It is this major change of perspective that makes the linguistic and the related research rational and reasonable. For translation, norms allow creativity and change, and they help people understand the idea of "equivalence" more deeply, which further corrects and improves the understanding of literal translation and foreignization apart from Europeanized translation.Corpus linguistics is developing so fast that it does not only offer an efficient tool for translation studies, but also helps to form an objective and serious attitude towards language study. Reviewing the literature in this field is like the process of setting up a framework of research methodology and proves it little by little. With their help, I have finally found a way that best match the aim of this research-the use of POS-tagged comparative corpora supplies abundant data and opens a door to quantitative outlook of Europeanized translation.Translatology and Chinese studies of course are the most important and direct part of my reference. It covers three major subtopics:attitude classification, lexical and syntactical research, and translation strategies. As for attitudes towards Europeanized translation, just like many other matters, scholars may support it, fight against it, or stay neutral. For those who stay neutral, some are fairly active and keep doing research on all kinds of questions while others are rather passive and just take the wait-and-see attitude. Nevertheless, the academia is generally changing from close to open, from strict to tolerant, and they go from subjective perception to rational analysis. In the field of lexical and syntactical research, systematic ones are rarely seen. After Wang Li, there are only a few books published on Europeanization and Europeanized translation, like those from Xie Yaoji, Guo Hongjie, He Yang, etc. Although we still find plenty of valuable papers from big names like Shi Dingxu, Zhu Zhiyu, Hu Kaibao, Benjamin T'sou, You Rujie, etc., research on this topic is still far from enough comparing with the speed of translation and the change of Chinese. Finally, we can clearly see that most people attribute the Europeanization to unhappy translation, and further attribute those contact-induced unhappy translations to the influence of English and the lack of translation techniques. Since the influence from English is unavoidable, we have to find the way out from translation. Unfortunately, we are relatively poor in papers that concentrate on English-Chinese translation techniques, and to make it worse, most conclusions are too vague and general to be put into practice.The brief review in this chapter shows that there is still a lot to be done in the research of Europeanized translation. For instance, more international research fruits shall be learnt and absorbed, the research methods shall be improved and enriched, more explanation shall be given, spoken language shall be included, etc.II. Main Body. It includes chapters 3 to 6.Chapter 3 can be regarded as the basic framework of theory in this research, which intends to give a qualitative analysis on Europeanized translation. It starts with the confirmation of inevitability of its existence from both the internal mechanism and the external factors. Then it lists some typical examples to show the scope of Europeanization, from which we see that this phenomenon has been spread to at least lexical and syntactical level, and they are widely existed in all works of life. Facing the overwhelming situation, we should not be too hasty to put all of the Europeanization into negative catalog. Instead, there should be a relatively clear and reasonable line between positive and negative Europeanization, and telling them from each other are not only necessary but significant as well. Based on this fact, some basic principles are proposed from multiple aspects.Chapter 4 concentrates on the detailed information of the English-Chinese Translation Corpus and its building history. In this chapter, the building procedure is explained step by step, with plenty of figures showing the processing tools, concordancer, statistical software and analytical tools. Besides, it also mentions the six large comparing corpora. This complete introduction helps to prove the data and their analysis in the following chapter convincing enough.Chapter 5, as the core of this research, processes a great amount of typical cases of Europeanized translation via data from the seven corpora. It endeavors to fish out the rules and regulations through quantitative comparison between translated texts and non-translated texts. At the lexical level, it carries out some experiments on parts of speech (including the general proportion and the amount of specific part of speech), foreign-originated words (especially lettered words), and some collocations. At the syntactical level, it calculates the sentence length, observes the attributive and its indicator "de"(的),and compares the usage of "ba" and "bei" structures(把字句和被字句).Statistics show all kinds of foreign-originated words, though not balanced enough, are very widely and frequently used in the Chinese written and spoken language, including those seemingly-not-promising ones like the lettered words and transliterations, and this trend keeps growing rapidly. Many of these words are even readily accepted as indigenous to the Chinese! However, for those that are recognized as foreign originated, people tend to use them much more cautiously.Investigation is also done on the distribution and frequency of different parts of speech. The results show that in translations substantives grow while empty words drops, which indicates an eminent tendency towards hypotaxis.Later, more detailed studies show that, concerning the use of words and phrases, monotony, inverted order, and high frequency are three most common problems, among which monotony is the key factor in producing Europeanized translation.The average length of sentences show translated texts tend to have shorter sentences but longer sentence segments, which proves that translation is actually a contradictory process that unconsciously combines the simplification and complication together in an awkward way.In the research of attributives, the indicator "de" IS used widely and has brought very notorious effects to translation, but in fact, their frequency varied evidently between different genres and resources. Therefore, it might be more reasonable to say that the degree of attributive Europeanization is in proportion with the original text and the translator.The research compares two typical traditional Chinese structures, and find that while "ba" structure do not change a lot, the "bei" structure in translation is used twice as much as non-translation, and a more serious problem is that the Chinese diversity in expressing passive connotations have been terribly destroyed. And it is the destruction of diversity that brings the negative Europeanization in translation.Finally, this chapter mentions about two collocations, one is brand new and the other is not completely new but is used much more often today. The former, "you+verb"(有+动词),is now considered as the baby form of past perfect tense under the influence of English "have done", and is still under the a process grammaticalization. This idea can be partly proved by the samples from our translation corpus, but the problem here is that most of them are used just to make the sentence awkward and redundant. The latter, "ruci...yizhiyu"(如此……以至于),a perfect equivalence of the English "so...that" structure, is also criticized for too frequent use in translation. However, there is nothing wrong to use it for proper emphasizing; the root of this problem lies in its abuse, i.e., the wrong use under unnecessary circumstances. In spite of that, the intensive usage of a single collocation will again cause the ignorance of other expressions.In this chapter, an objective and relatively comprehensive outlook of Europeanized translation is displayed, within which, some previous perceptions are proved whereas some others are corrected, modified or added.Chapter 6 reports the result of a couple of questionnaires on Europeanized translation, which shows the public attitude and their recognizing ability. The questionnaires are designed respectively with all kinds of collected foreign-originated words and examples of Europeanized sentences. Statistics show that the public is not sensitive enough to Europeanized translation, and does not hold unified ideas on different cases. People do realize the existence of foreign-originated words, but still use them, cautiously though. However, the ways of translation means very much in the frequency and density. As for the Europeanized syntax, statistics show that the degree of recognition and acceptability varies with age, English level, degree of education, but not with sex, yet even those whose have enough language knowledge cannot fully recognize or refuse the influence of Europeanization. Although people are different in attitude, especially towards different types of Europeanization, they generally accept the Europeanized syntax.It is a very important supplement to the corpus-based study in the previous chapter, because it is necessary to know what people think and show respect to it. In addition to that, the public attitude shall be considered as one of the key factors when it comes to the differentiation of positive and negative Europeanized translation.III. Extended Research. It includes chapters 7 and 8.Based on the previous studies from both myself and other scholars, these two parallel chapters attempt to give a comprehensive analysis, objective evaluation and systematic summary of Europeanized translation, together with the appropriate ways to deal with them. They are supplementary to each other as they discuss the problem respectively from positive and negative aspects. Chapter 7 focuses on the positive side of Europeanized translation and makes great efforts to explore their contributions. In this chapter, the author lists the principal norms in distinguishing the positive ones from negative ones, which is enlightened by the Theory of Three-Dimensional Grammar under the Chinese studies. The three dimensions in this theory refer to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; and the most meaningful contribution of this theory lies in its emphasis on the general consideration from all the three dimensions instead of syntax alone. As for English-Chinese translation, concerning words and sentences, or even discourse level, they can be briefly decoded as norms like whether a certain translation is so necessary or vivid that there is no better equivalence in Chinese, whether it is correct in accordance with the common practice of Chinese word-building or the SVO syntactical structure or the corresponding writing style, whether it properly conveys the original meaning while successfully avoids unnecessary or even wrong imagination, whether it is appropriate within its context according to the Chinese understanding, whether it is more economical than other versions, or whether it serves the intended rhetorical functions. Those that live up to these norms shall be considered as positive-undoubtedly, the more norms a translation conforms to, the more valuable it is, and quite probably, the easier it is accepted and the longer life it is expected to have. Seeing the positive side of Europeanized translation is not only constructive for English-Chinese translation, but also opens the door wider for the future development of the Chinese language.Chapter 8, however, fixates on the negative side and probes into lexical and syntactical manifestations of negative Europeanized translation. In the first part, the author points out that when translating new words, priority should be given to liberal translation, but factors like clearness, economy, vividness, pronunciation, psychology, and even aesthetic values shall be taken into consideration; while for existing words, enough respect shall be paid to the accepted conventional translation, and at the same time, emphasis shall be laid upon consistency, not only within but also between translation works. Then it suggests that a dynamic system be set up for the research of foreign-originated words translation, in which normalization, filtration and optimization shall be the major work. In the second part, the author centered on improving sentence translation, where adjusting the length, word order, attributive, and "bei" structure are typical cases. Finally in the third part, the author mentions about the importance of efficient use of dictionaries. IV. ConclusionChapter 9 concludes the whole research by summarizing the status quo of Europeanized translation; showing the appropriate way of observing the trend of Europeanization; stating that translation needs a balance between norms and innovations for a healthy way of development; and pointing out the future directions of the present research on the basis of a good understanding of its limitations.INNOVATIONSThis research is innovative in the following four aspects:attitude, method, depth and scope.Attitude:It changes from static to dynamic, and from over-emphasis on the negative side to lay equal emphasis on both negative and positive sides. This research, based on sufficient corpus investigation and questionnaire, puts forward a balanced idea on Europeanized translation and offers a series of dynamic descriptive norms, where the value and contributions of positive Europeanized translation is recognized at the same time when the optimizing approaches for negative ones are supplied. Thus it moves a little forward on the way of seeking the truth on this issue.Method:It tries to make the research more convincing by combining qualitative research together with quantitative analysis and melting scattered case studies into the organic POS-tagged corpus study, which guarantees more reliable and much richer outcomes. As a matter of fact, this empirical study does disclose a number of uncovered differences between English-Chinese translation and the Chinese original works, thus has made some additions and modifications to the previous conclusions.Scope:The word "scope" here has two meanings. The first one indicates that this research has borrowed the Theory of Three-Dimensional Grammar from Chinese studies so that the ideas are freed from pure syntactical correctness and the scope of horizon is broadened. Now, semantics and pragmatics are clearly two indispensable factors to be taken into account. The second refers to the material used in corpus, which pays special attention to the latest material and the oral speeches. Considering all the seven corpora used in this research, the style and the genre are really rich. These efforts obviously make for more persuasive data and more convincing conclusions.SIGNIFICANCE AND CONTRIBUTIONSTheoretically, this research is significant because:Firstly, this study makes full use of empirical studies to investigate the degree and the scope of influence from English on the English-Chinese translation, and the large amount of data do not only replenish the study of the field, but also rectify some misconceptions on this issue. Also, it makes the direction and the focus of future study clearerSecondly, this research, based on powerful data from investigation and experiments, puts forward a pair of concepts of "positive Europeanization" and "negative Europeanization" and the dynamic norms for classification. Surely, this theory framework moves one step forward towards the cognition of Europeanization and the Europeanized translation. It helps to correct the partial understanding, which encourages the exploration on the positive side and makes the criticism on the negative side more persuasive.Thirdly, this research is significant as it introduces the study of contact linguistics into translatology. It observes the degree and the scope of Chinese language change through the uniqueness of Chinese translation, and evaluates the role that English has played in the Chinese language and culture. Therefore it contributes to both translatology and contact linguistics.Practically, this research contributes to the following fields:Translatology:The sketch of the framework for Europeanized translation, the initial verification of the English influence on it, together with the dynamic norms and classification principles, form the foundation for future research work, especially for the researches on foreignization and literal translation as Europeanized translation is a typical example for both of them. Translation practice and translation teaching:the ideas in this research help to form a rational attitude towards translation, to realize the fact of language change and its relationship with translation, and to be capable of observing and evaluating Europeanized translation in a scientific and reasonable way. What is more, it implies that there are new requirements for translators today, among which improving the bilingual level (especially the Chinese level) and enhancing the conscious of comparison shall still be given more priority than ever. The optimization strategies are of course useful in guiding translation practice, yet the translation corpus built during the research process may offer genuine samples, with which, the strategies will work better. Finally, this research further broadens the horizon for translation criticism as it formally puts forward the positive function of Europeanization thus offers one more perspective.Teaching Chinese to foreigners:this research benefits teachers in updating their knowledge about positive and negative transfer, and is useful for make appropriate decisions in error analysis.The result of this research can also be referred to in other related fields, including dictionary compiling because it offers the principles of introducing new words, and Chinese corpus building because it accumulates certain amount of experiences and lessons especially in Chinese materials.For the general public, this research may be valuable too, in that it leads people to feel the charm of the Chinese language and reminds them to love, to understand and to use the standard Chinese consciously.LIMITATIONSAs a very tiny part of translation study, this dissertation is hopefully making some progresses and contributions, but admittedly, there are some limitations and problems existing, and any criticism and improvement on it would be highly appreciated.The first limitation stems from the corpus methodology. Just like Sylviane Granger (2007:22-23) has pointed out, corpus-based study is applicable for translatology, but it needs attention that the scale of corpora is limited, and the results of concordance might be seriously affected by the way it is done. When these problems cannot be overcome effectively enough in this research, there may still be some distance between the conclusions here and the facts. Thus, it is very safe to say that once the corpus is semantically and pragmatically tagged, the results will surely become more comprehensive and more persuasive.The next limitation is caused by the confusion in dealing with Chinese materials. As it is well known, Chinese materials need to be cut into words before they can be tagged, however, there is still no completely unified stand for word segment yet, and to make it worse, the norms of POS tag are also under discussion. Therefore, the statistical errors will inevitably appear in the research. Even when we endeavor to reduce the margin of error, they are still there, so the conclusions will have to be waiting for further tests and modifications.Finally, this discussion concerns with only one factor in the process of language change. As a matter of fact, the style of original texts, the ability of translators, time allowed for translation, the condition and means of translation, and even the requirement from customers all contribute the quality of translation. A full understanding of Europeanized translation comes only after a full consideration of all functioning factors.