A Corpus-Based Study On Translation Of Hedges In Economic News Reports From The Perspective Of Mona Baker’s Narrative Theory

In real language use,people will always modify their utterances with certain linguistic strategies for some purposes.As one of the linguistic strategies,hedges(or hedging devices)serve to either influence truth value of a proposition,making it more convincing,or implicitly express writer’s attitude,or establish good relationship with readers and enhance the persuasiveness of the claims.It is believed that hedges play an important role in texts of various genres.However,hedges in economic news reports receive limited research interest.Meanwhile,previous studies reveal that different language systems and cultural backgrounds make it more challenging in the interpretation and translation of hedges across languages,but current research in this area still needs to be developed,especially the translation between English and Chinese.Therefore,to analyze the translation of hedges in economic news is of great significance.Based on a corpus-driven research design,the author attempts to make a comparative analysis of English economic news and their corresponding translations,the data of which are collected from websites of Financial Times and The New York Times.In addition,the comparative research between original and translated Chinese news reports will be included to further understand the difference in the use of hedges.The study is composed of two parts: the quantitative analysis aims to discover the similarities and differences of hedges in terms of the overall number and frequency.And then,qualitative analysis focuses on the type of hedge which varies most in the translation process,using Mona Baker’s narrative theory to explore the translation changes and the background reasons.The theory is applied because it focuses on the stance mediation in news translation which,according to scholars,may be caused by variations of hedges.The research shows that hedges in original and translated Chinese reports have similar distribution but different in total number.Meanwhile,study of the parallel corpora demonstrates that hedges used in English news reports are more frequent and diverse than those in Chinese translations,which may be attributed to communicative habits between the two languages.Among different types of hedges,the epistemic modal verbs are the most preferred,they also experience the most significant changes in translation.Further observations and studies find that through framing strategies used for the translation of hedges,translators are able to mitigate or attenuate writers certain attitude towards the realization of the events or reestablish the relation between translation works and readers.From this,the narrative and attitude of the news reports have been reconstructed so as to improve the persuasiveness of the news and guide readers in making objective judgement.As for possible motives of the translation choice,target readership and political relations between the narrative participants should be taken into account.From a relatively new perspective,in this thesis,the author tries to explore the translation of hedges in economic news reports.The study enriches the comparative analysis on hedges between English and Chinese,provides a new interpretation for the variations of hedging devices,which could contribute to other researches within the field.