On Small Chinese Numerals And Their Translation

Numerals, whose basic functions are counting and ordering, play an important role in almost every field of the world. However, numerals in literary language do not always express precise numeral concepts; instead, they express fuzzy meanings in most situations because of their abundant philosophical, cultural and aesthetic implications which reflect the thinking mode, cognition and aesthetic view of a cultural group. Especially in Chinese, numerals, under the influence of age-old Chinese culture, are rich in connotation and favored by Chinese people, so they frequently appear in idioms, verses, novels and other literary works to express rich meanings and emotions. Due to the high frequency of numerals in the Chinese language, and different semantic, cultural connotations and syntactic usage between English and Chinese numerals, it is essential to make research on their translation. Although there is no lack of researches on this aspect, most of them are descriptive and general. It would be more convictive if an interpretative and explanatory theoretical basis is provided for the translation research on numerals.Small numerals (one to ten), which are the most typical ones of all numerals, can be regarded as the prototypes of numeral category. They have the highest frequency of appearance in literary language, so this thesis takes small Chinese numerals as the research subject. On the basis of a wide range of data collection, this study takes Morris's semiotic meaning theory and Nida's sociosemiotic translation theory, the prototype theory and fuzzy linguistics as the main theoretical framework and makes use of Morris'interpretation of semiotic meanings to categorize and analyze the referential, linguistic and pragmatic meanings of small Chinese numerals. Then it categorizes small numerals in Chinese expressions into referential-meaning-highlighted ones, referential-meaning-faded ones and others according to the distances between their pragmatic and referential meanings before discussing their translation strategies.The research shows that among all semiotic meanings of a small Chinese numeral it is easy to translate the referential meaning while linguistic meaning is the most difficult one to be retained in the target language as a result of the differences between English and Chinese language systems. As to small Chinese numerals, translators should mainly grasp their pragmatic meanings without ignoring their referential and linguistic ones. In regard to those referential-meaning(prototype)-highlighted ones, literal translation should be given priority to, so that the original vague conception can be transmitted and the specific charm of small Chinese numerals can be retained, which is also of benefit to the spread of Chinese culture. As to the referential-meaning-faded ones, different translation strategies should be adopted according to different elements like cognition of TR, non-verbal semiotic meanings, etc., on the basis of transmitting the general pragmatic meanings. In addition, making compensation for the loss of linguistic meaning and its pragmatic meaning is also necessary. The small numerals standing between the above two categories mainly express the concept of"many"or"few". Different language users often do not misunderstand them because of their similarities in the cognitive process of categorization. So literal translation strategy adopted to transmit Chinese culture and corresponding translation taken to cater to TC are both preferred. In a word, whatever strategy a translator chooses, the ultimate purpose is to transmit original meanings as completely as possible and find out an optimal point between precision and fuzziness, concreteness and abstractness, rationality and perceptibility, domestication and foreignization, aiming at a correspondence in meaning and similarity in function to the full extent.Overall, on the basis of semiotic meaning theory and sociosemiotic translation theory, the prototype theory and fuzzy linguistics, this thesis categorizes the semiotic meanings of small Chinese numerals and gives interpretations to the formation of fuzziness and fuzzy beauty, and provides an explanatory theoretical basis for choosing translation strategies of small Chinese numerals in expressions, which complements and refines the previous studies on this aspect and contributes to the translation research of numerals.