On The Translation Of Lexical Categories In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Categorization Theory

Categorization, as an important theory in cognitive linguistics, refers to humans’ mental process of classification under interaction of objective elements and subjective psychology. With profound psychological basis, categorization has certain theoretical and practical value to translation study. Taking Shuihuzhuan and its two English versions as corpus data, this thesis intends to study lexical re-categorization and translation from the perspective of contemporary categorization theory.Dating back to Classical Theory put forward by Aristotle, prototypical category theory is gradually molded in the development of categorization with the point-making such as "family resemblance" and "foci". Prototypical categorization theory holds that there exists a prototype in each kind of category.There are three levels of category:basic level category, subordinate level category, and superordinate level category. Compared with the other two levels, basic level category gets a relatively central position, which is more common in our perceptional process.Based on the notion claimed by cognitive linguists that words have cognitive and psychological foundation, the nature of words translation is a process containing the switching of cognitive categories between languages. Drawing materials from Shuihuzhuan and its English versions respectively by Pearl Buck and Dent-Yang, this thesis mainly studies the transfer of lexical category in English and Chinese. Lexical category in the thesis principally includes three types:general category like color terms, sound imitation, unit terms, actions; culture-specific category as ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture; and also category extension, containing metaphor and metonymy. In addition to these, lexical category can be used as a textual cohesive device. Langacker’s S,T scanning model is referred to explain the four translation outcomes of Pearl Buck and Dent-Yang, which can be concluded as:S>T(overtranslaion); S<T(undertranslation); S=T(equivalent translation);S≠T(mistranslation).The thesis has studied the translation difference of the lexical categories between Dent-Yang’s work and Pearl Buck’s based on the qualitative and quantitative comparison. The outcome shows that Pearl Buck has done a relatively better job in terms of the lexical categories translation with higher frequency of equivalent translation and lower frequency of overtranslation and undertranslation. However, there are certain inadequacies in Buck’s translation with a higher frequency of mistranslation and non-translation. The difference results are mainly due to the different understandings to the source text and the different translation strategies’adoption.