A Corpus-assisted Comparative Study On Translationese Of Jude The Obscure

Fluent and idiomatic high-quality translation will promote the international exchange of different civilizations, science and technology. However, poor awkward translation often pose obstacles to cultural, scientific, technological and other communications. Translationese proves one of the most important factors that form those obstacles and impair the quality of translation, even has incurred considerable damage to the inherent purity and charm of the Chinese language. So far, there are many outstanding translators at home and abroad who have studied on the phenomenon of translationese in an attempt to tackle this problem. Their study used to adopt qualitative research methodology, and the analyses tend to be subjective. The author of this thesis bases the research on Zhang Guruo and Geng Zhi’s Chinese translations of Jude the Obscure by establishing parallel corpora ZGRPARA and GZPARA of the two versions, and comparing each of them with the reference corpus CCTFC (Contemporary Chinese Translated Fiction Corpus). To date, few parallel corpora-assisted studies on translationese of Jude the Obscure have been found. This thesis attempts to avail itself of the theories of contrastive linguistics and corpus-based or assisted translation studies to make a detailed analysis of the two Chinese versions. On the basis of the above analysis, the present writer describes and interprets the possible reasons behind translationese.The major findings of this study are presented as follows:(1) In comparison with Zhang Guruo’s version, the major types of translationese in Geng’s version are identified as inappropriate collocation of words,excessive use of structural particle "的", excessive literalism and ambiguous expression, and incoherence of logic.(2) The research also reveals that the average sentence length of ZGR is significantly shorter than that of GZ, and the frequency of the occurrence of conjunctions in GZ is significantly higher than that of ZGR.(3) The reasons for translationese can be attributed to the differences between source language and target language, their cultural differences, and translator’s disqualification and use of inappropriate translation methods. In addition, the thesis presents some measures to solve the problem of translationese.