A Study On Features Of English-originated Loanwords In Chinese Media And Their Translation In Cross-cultural Communication

Language is an essential tool for humans to exchange notes or express emotions,and it never ceases to develop. People tend to borrow words from another languagewhen bumping into new concepts or notions that do not exist in their mother tongue,and those borrowed words are called loanwords. Loanwords derive from languagecontact as well as cultural communication. Owing to the open communication amongpeoples, lexical borrowing between different languages has been enhanced and lots ofloanwords that reflect the modern life and culture have been produced. As thelanguage globalization and international exchanges continue, China is entering a stageof openness, fickleness and rapidity. Loanwords, the carrier of foreign culture, start topermeate every societal field of China. The number of loanwords has proliferated sorapidly that many of them are ultimately accepted by the public and admitted intoChinese vocabulary, especially the ones borrowed from the English language.From the angle of cross-cultural communication, this thesis, based on thetheories of language contact and linguistic borrowing, focuses on the study of theEnglish-originated loanwords frequently used in Chinese mainstream media in thenew age. The phonetic, morphological and semantic features of English-originatedloanwords are thoroughly analyzed, and their impact upon the Chinese language andculture is also discussed. Five different translation strategies are presented withabundant examples, and they are transliteration, integration of transliteration andsemantic translation, translation by adding a generic term, direct transference andsemantic translation. The translation tendency of English-originated loanwords is alsoresearched on the basis of mass data, which not only guide the healthy development ofthe Chinese language but also signify the close contact and cultural fusion betweenChinese and English.The continuous absorption of loanwords from English seems like a double-edgedsword: on the one hand, they enrich Chinese vocabulary, bridge the lexical gaps, andprovide creative and productive morphemes for Chinese lexical system; while on theother hand, the abuse of lettered words and the prevalence of loanwords carelesslytranslated on the Internet poses malign influence on the development of the Chinese language and should be corrected and prevented.