A Corpus-Based Study On The Explicitation Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Lord In The Chinese Translations Of Shakespeare's Plays

Translation is a human activity which involves the author, the translator, the reader of the translation and the social cultural elements of both languages. Complicated as it is, certain unwritten universal rules still exist. In the field of translation studies, scholars have paid much attention to these rules and made attempts to reveal the features of translation, especially those that are universal in translated texts. Since the 1990s, statistics generated by the computer-based analysis and the mass corpora of source text (ST) and target text (TT) have provided a new perspective for translation studies—corpus-based translation studies. The study on the universal features of the translated language has earned much attention from within the given circle, and by far yielded many achievements, among which the probes into"translation universals"are all the more fruitful and high-profile. The existence of the"translation universals", especially the hypothesis of explicitation brought by Blum-Kulka (1986) has been attested to a large degree in translation that happen between many languages, by famous scholars like ?ver?s, Baker, Wang Kefei, through comparing the number of conjunctions, connective devices, sentence equivalence ratio, etc. However, seldom is there studies test the hypothesis from the perspective of lexical variety of the translated texts.Studies on the Chinese translations of Shakespeare's plays have been always attractive. By 2004, more than 150 papers had been published since 1950s. (Li Weimin, 2004) They made comprehensive studies on the different Chinese versions of Shakespeare's plays. However, most of these researches were conducted in traditional qualitative study. Based on the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare's Plays, the present paper makes a quantitative study of Liang Shiqiu's and Zhu Shenghao's Chinese translations of Shakespearean plays, with the special focus on how they reproduce and/or reconstruct the interpersonal meanings of the address term—lord through translation, provides reasonable explanations, and tries to test the hypothesis of explicitation in translated language from the perspective of lexical variety.