A Corpus-based Analyses Of The Translation In Chinese-english Dictionaries

The Chinese-English dictionary(C-E dictionary)is an indispensable tool for English learners.The accuracy and completeness of its translation in determine whether or not learners can produce more acceptable English.As a subclass of the Chinese fugitive verbs,the appearance verbs describe the appearance of an entity on the scene.Besides,these verbs that are frequently used in both translated Chinese texts and original Chinese texts have great si gnificance and value to be explored.Previous studies on appearance verbs mainly focus on corpus and cognitive linguistics which further prove the importance of the appearance verbs.This thesis carries out a corpus-driven exploration on the translation of appearance verbs in Chinese-English dictionaries.This thesis chooses Chinese appearance verbs by sampling,including“出现”,“发生”,“产生”,“呈现”,“展现”,“显现”,and then analyzes their representation in New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(NCCED)and New Age Chinese-English Dictionary(NACED).This thesis attempts to combine Co-Selection with Theory of Norms and Exploitations(TNE)to construct a new translation model,which interprets three main principles on which translation is based:prototype principle,semantic prosody principle,and gestalt principle.Based on the four parameters in Sinclair’s model of the Extended Unit of Meaning(EUM),this thesis extracts authentic concordance lines from Chinese Modern Language Corpus and British National Corpus for analyzing.The conclusion can be drawn that firstly,the descriptions on the collocation,colligation,semantic prosody of these verbs in both dictionaries are far from enough;secondly,NCCED lays much emphasis on norms of the appearance verbs,ignoring the exploitations of them;thirdly,NCCED fails to present prototypical equivalent translation as far as the examples are concerned.This thesis takes the appearance verbs as an example to explore the translation in Chinese-English dictionaries from the perspective of Extended Unit of Meaningand Theory of Norms and Exploitations,which not only broadens the horizon of bilingual dictionary research but also has theoretical and practical significance for improving the compiling quality of Chinese-English dictionaries.