A Contrastive Study On E-C Translation Of Adjunct Adverbs

There are mainly three kinds of adjunct adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives: evaluative adjunct adverbs,domain adjunct adverbs and manner adjunct adverbs,which can be called as evaluative adverbs,domain adverbs and manner adverbs according to semantics.Most of the three kinds of adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives need translation shifts because they have no formal correspondents in Chinese.However,relevant studies on the translation shifts are not comprehensive.In addition,the phenomenon is just described at semantic level,a syntactic level analysis is absent.Translation shifts can be complemented by propositional subjectivity(subjectivity for short),since subjectivity can reflect whether or not the same kind of translation shift category can comment on propositions.In this way,the perspective of subjectivity offers the possibility of syntactic level analysis.As the subjective characteristics of these adverbs which premodify adjectives are not clear,it is necessary to analyze the subjectivity of the adverbs which premodify adjectives and to further study the contrast between human translation and machine translation from the perspective of subjectivity.The subjectivity of the three kinds of adverbs which premodify adjectives is analyzed with a survey.Corpus-based analysis is used to find out the similarities and differences between human translation and machine translation(Google Translate and Youdao Translate as typical machine translations).It is found that the subjectivity of the adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives is related with adverb types instead of syntactic structures.The subjectivity of evaluative adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives is restrained in source language.However,the subjectivity of domain adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives is not restrained in source language.Manner adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives are objective.Translation contrast shows that there are similarities between human translation and machine translation: most translations of the three kinds of adverbs conform to their subjectivity in source language;major translation shift categories of each kind of adverbs are the same.The contrast also shows that there are differences between human translation and machine translation.On one hand,translation shift categories in human translation are a little more varied especially when it comes to the translation of subjectivity.Compared with machine translation,human translation can turn evaluative adverbs into Chinese phrases,modal adverbs to manifest the subjectivity,and it can turn domain adverbs into Chinese clauses to manifest the subjectivity.On the other hand,translation accuracy of machine translation is lower than that of human translation.From this perspective,machine translation is inferior to human translation.In addition,Youdao Translate is better than Google Translate when it comes to the translation of subjectivity and translation accuracy.The research has implications for practical practice.Machine translation needs to improve the translation accuracy and methods such as post-editing can be properly used for Machine translation in terms of adverbs showing subjectivity.Besides,the research result can guide translators’ English-Chinese translation of these adverbs as premodifiers of adjectives and can shed some light on relevant Chinese-English translation.