A Corpus-based Study On Normalization In E-C Translation Of Business News

The past decades have witnessed the emergence and development of corpus-based research as a new research paradigm with theoretical elaboration and empirical research.The emergence of corpus-based translation studies has greatly promoted the study of translation universals.Translation universals can be classified into four aspects: simplification,explicitation,normalization and avoidance of repetitions.Nowadays most researchers put their emphases on simplification and explicitation,with a deep understanding of translation universals hypotheses.On the contrary,normalization is comparatively under-researched.However,The antecedent researchers have spent lots of time and energies studying normalization in literary works rather than non-literary works.In this thesis,the author conducts inter and intra-language comparison studies to analyze normalization existing in translated Chinese texts on the basis of corpus linguistics and translation universals.Furthermore,the author by virtue of three self-built mini corpora to support this study.Besides,Qualitative study is conducted to investigate motivations of normalization in the translated Chinese texts.This thesis aims to solve these three questions with the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches: 1)Compared with the original Chinese texts,do the translated Chinese texts have the tendency of normalization in language characteristics aspect? 2)Compared with the original English texts,do the translated Chinese texts have the tendency of normalization in sentence structure aspect? 3)What are the motivations to influence translated Chinese texts’ normalization phenomena?Three corpora in this study are corpus of translated Chinese business news(CTCBN),corpus of original Chinese business news(COCBN),corpus of original English business news(COEBN).CTCBN and COCBN constitute a larger comparable corpus while CTCBN and COEBN constitute a larger parallel corpus.The author obtains some findings on the basis of data analysis and qualitative study.In intra-language comparison,the author lays much emphasis on language characteristics.The author selects hapax legomena and high-frequency words as two variables in language characteristics level.Compared with the original Chinese texts,the translated Chinese texts demonstrate a distinct trend of normalization,which verifies the hypothesis raised in previous chapters.In inter-language comparison,the author analyzes the trend of normalization in sentence structure from passive voice and relative clauses aspects.By calculating the number of passive voice in original English texts,the author finds that translators transform English passive voice into Chinese active voice consciously in the process of translating.