The Expansion In Translation Between English And Chinese And Its Controllability

The research based on the English-Chinese parallel corpus revealed the fact that the length of translation tends to be longer than original both in English-Chinese translation and Chinese-English translation, which was given the coined term expansion in translation. The author has also observed such phenomenon through comparing great many originals and translations, and also found out that some expansion may not be desirable. This paper, based on the conclusion of the parallel corpus research, tries to discuss expansion in the framework of information theory since translation is an inter-lingual activity with communicative nature.Firstly, this paper introduces what is expansion in translation. Secondly, existing tentative explanation to expansion are introduced, together with their limitation in explaining this phenomenon. Thirdly, the information theory is introduced, and by using the communication model and the concept of redundancy, expansion can be seen as the result of the redundancy built in translation to reduce the information overload to decoder's channel, and expansion, in this sense, is a natural tendency, which is sometimes indispensable. Fourthly, it is proposed that expansion should be maintained within an appropriate level and undesirable expansion should be avoided, and at last, the strategies to control unwanted expansion are put forward together with the principles under which the two strategies are to apply. It is hoped that this paper could contribute to the study of features of translation to provide theoretical support for teaching and practice of translation. Meanwhile, the question of expansion in interpretation is raised for further research in future, since only written translation is the only focus in this paper.