A Corpus-based Study On The Chinese Translation Of Four Novels By Charles Dickens

Corpus as a bourgeoning research resource and platform has already had a profound effect on the development of the various ramifications of the linguistic research. With its unique wide and firm empirical basis, it can be used to verify hypotheses and formulate theories. Admittedly, it also can be or is being applied in translation studies. Since corpus was applied to translation studies at the end of the 20th century, the primary theoretic fruitage should be the universals of translation advocated by Mona Baker, Andrew Chesterman, Sara Laviosa, et al.This magisterial thesis sets as its task to prove the existence of the universals of translation in the process of English-Chinese translation. It applies a parallel corpus and corpus linguistic methods to contrastively analyze four Charles Dickens'famous novels both in English and Chinese versions, i.e. the Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. According to Mona Baker's definition, universals of translation are linguistic features which typically occur in translated rather than original texts and are considered to be independent of the influence of specific language pairs involved during translation. A number of features, which have been considered common to all types of translated texts, concern simplification, explicitation, avoidance of repetitions present in the source text, discourse transfer, distinctive distribution of lexical items and normalization.This thesis is an analysis and description of the simplification, explicitation and normalization circumstances occurring in the English-Chinese translation of the four novels. Some classical evidences are to be trawled through a parallel corpus and, the probabilistic data are to be used to construe the three accredited universals. At the same time, some examples of resistance are found to the universals of translation albeit it posits some linguistic features unequivocally occur in translated texts. Since translation per se is the embodiment of communication between languages, societies and cultures, some different or microcosmic translation strategies and translation norms have to be employed to bridge the gaps between them. In addition, it cannot be ignored that the corpus-based theory, viz. universals of translation, are mainly educed in the light of the corpora of Indo-European languages. To some extent, English-Chinese corpus is still a relatively new field. This thesis also expatiates on the conscious or unconscious resistance of translators in the process of translation contrasted to the three features hypothesized as universals of translation. Meanwhile, the author tables several proposals for the sake of partially counteracting the negative effects of simplification, explicitation and normalization tendencies to the quality of translations. In this sense, it does not follow the traditional viewpoint on the universals of translation in descriptive translation studies and corpus-based studies. Therefore, some English-Chinese translation features are proposed in light of this research, i.e. the co-existence of the universals and the translator's resistance against it.