Corpus-based Translation Criticism

Translation criticism,which aims at objectively evaluating the translated works and phenomena,focuses on observing and analyzing the process and results of translation in a comprehensive and systematic way and serves an active role in guiding translation practice.At the same time,it emphasizes that the translators should be faithful during the process of translation.However,in recent years,translation criticism hasn’t played its due role and the empirical method has not been effectively applied because of the slow theoretical development and the lack of relevant criteria and methodology.In light of the above facts,Wang and Zhang(2020)applied the corpusbased approach to the study of translation criticism and proposed a three-dimensional interpretative framework for translation criticism.With the assistance of the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,their research not only explored the linguistic regularity of the translated texts,but also further interpreted translation phenomena in terms of three levels,language and text,the translator and targetlanguage society.In order to further prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the three-dimensional interpretative framework in the study of translation criticism,this study chooses news reports published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as the corpus and analyzes how translators transform the evaluative resources,namely,good,say/says/said/saying and quite,contained in source texts into the corresponding Chinese expressions in target texts.Also,this study further interprets these translation phenomena based on the factors within the framework and tries to examine whether there are other elements that are not included in the framework.The findings show that:(1)In most cases,the selected evaluative resources in source texts are equivalent in meaning to the translated resources in target texts,but sometimes translators stray away from the original,resulting in unfaithful translation phenomena,namely,nonequivalence and ellipsis;(2)these unfaithful translation phenomena can be further interpreted by the factors within the three-dimensional interpretative framework,and thus the practicality and reliability of the framework are again proved;(3)the threedimensional interpretative framework for translation criticism is relatively complete and can be used to interpret translation phenomena basically.This corpus-based thesis empirically discusses translation criticism in news discourse and validates the effectiveness and feasibility of the three-dimensional interpretative framework for translation criticism by further interpreting the translation phenomena of the selected evaluative resources,which not only helps to evaluate translation quality and interpret translation phenomena,but also provides future researches with a new research perspective.