Redundancy And Translation

Redundancy is a concept in information theory initiated by Shannon (1949). It refers to extra information released purposely by the source to counteract "noises"—various factors that may interfere with the transmission of information. Later in the 1960s Eugene A. Nida applied the concept to translation theory and practice.Linguists have proved redundancy a common phenomenon in language, both in the language systems and people's daily communications through language. However, redundancy is distributed differently in different languages and varies greatly from case to case in different situational contexts. This makes necessary the studies of redundancy in translation, as translation involves at least two languages and different source texts have different amount of redundancy, which needs to be treated respectively.The first chapter of this paper centers round the classification of redundancy— linguistic redundancy and situational redundancy. It also deals with the reasons for the existence of these two kinds of redundancy.The second chapter makes a comparison of redundancy in English and Chinese on three different levels, that is, on lexical, syntactical and textual levels.Both the first and the second chapters pave the way for the third...