On The Use Of Multiple Modifiers In Translational Chinese

This thesis is dedicated to explore the diachronic change of translational C hinese in the use of multiple modifiers focusing on “… de N de Vn” construction, as well as its influence on the evolution of Modern Standard C hinese(Kratochvil 1968:19). It describes the tendency of the change and explains the underlying reasons that triggered it. The statistical result in pilot study shows that the 1920 s and the 1930 s witness a surge of the use of multiple modifiers in “… de N de Vn” construction in translational C hinese, and this structure becomes longer and more complex afterwards, which seems to have an influence on original C hinese. Driven by this, the research object is determined.This research depends more on corpus-driven method than on corpus-based method. The author utilizes both quantitative and qualitative analysis consecutively in the two body parts. Besides, the inductive and deductive methods are utilized for analyzing English-Chinese and Japanese-Chinese translation cases respectively. On the whole, the method of comparative analysis contributes a lot to the study. The thesis is written on the basis of the theories in theoretical linguistics, historical comparative linguistics, social linguistics, contact linguistics, and corpus translation studies. Specifically speaking, they are: endocentric construction(Bloomfield 1933), translatio n shifts(Catford 1965), rank shift(Halliday 2004), selective grammatical copying(Johanson 2008), and the criteria of translation evaluation proposed by Lin Yutang, to name but a few.The conclusions are as follows:First, Ever since the May Fourth Vernacular Chinese Movement, the multiple modifiers in “… de N de Vn” construction has displayed a tendency of getting longer and more complex in translational C hinese or even in original C hinese. These two variants have been interacting with each other through the entire twentieth century with the former stimulating the latter and the latter restricting the former.Second, the reason why they display the above tendency is that some translators rigidly adhere to the equivalence of language unit. They tend to re nder the “multiple modifiers + head word” phrases in English to “… de N de Vn” phrases in C hinese with little consideration of the habitual expressions in target language. It is the overuse of one structure in code-switching that plunges it into a greater danger of being over-stretched. To avoid this, translators should adopt the strategy of what Catford(1965) termed as “translation shifts”(Munday 2001:60) or what Hal iday termed as “rank shift”(2004:253).