A Corpus-based Study Of Term Translation Consistency In Han Shu

The translation and retranslation of Chinese historical classics is an important medium to introduce Chinese culture to the western world. Although it is a time-and energy-consuming project, quite a number of researchers and organizations in the relevant fields both at home and abroad have devoted themselves to this task.Observations of the English versions of the Chinese historical classics in the bilingual corpus indicate that one of the biggest problems in translating Chinese historical classics is terminological inconsistency, i.e. a term may be translated differently by one translator in one English version, and the differences between different versions seem to be more prevalent. In order to promote the translation of Chinese historical classics, investigation of the term translation patterns would be an essential step for the successful transfer of the Chinese culture.This paper proposes that terminological inconsistency is mainly due to insufficient standardized term translation pair data. A preliminary research about the status quo of term translation in Chinese historical classics would lay the foundation for the standardization of historical term translation and the construction of a historical term bank. This paper focuses on the official title term translations in Han Shu as case studies for the terminological translation patterns and features.Han Shu, the second of the 24 official dynastic histories, created the biographical style for dynastic histories, and influenced the patterns of the following dynastic histories in ancient China. The two major partial English translations in the USA, one by H. H. Dubs and the other by Burton Watson, have been very well recognized in the western world. This paper assesses and evaluates the extent to which the Chinese historical terms are inconsistently rendered in the two versions, examines the reasons for such inconsistency by employing the corpus-based translation studies methodology, and finds most terms are translated consistently by one translator, but handled differently by different translators. But most of their different translations share some common features, such as similar phrase patterns composed of different words, and similar wording in different phrase patterns. However, the two translators Watson and Dubs don't exhibit a specific pattern particular to either of them. The study also probes into the reasons for the terminological translation inconsistency by analyzing the causes for the differences in one version and between the two versions.The findings are:the synonymy of source terms; interpolations in the source text as detected by the translator; different translation strategies and styles, etc. This research lays the foundation for devising a set of standards for Chinese historical term translation and to construct a Chinese historical term bank.