A Study On English-Chinese Transliteration And The Norms Of Its Character Selection

The information age provides the favorite circumstances for the boom of transliterated words, while, with the development of network communication, the nonstandard facts of the character selection in transliteration and the use of transliterated words do exist extensively. People need barrier-free communication more than ever in such a global village, so there is a significant need to study English-Chinese transliteration and the character selection of transliterated words. In the meantime, the standardization of the proper use of Chinese characters has been put on the agenda by the Language and Character Administration Department, and then it is also high time to study the norms of character selection in transliteration.The thesis starts with the introduction to include research background, research methodology and the significance of the study. Then it comes to the literature review of transliteration, including its definitions, principles and its value and necessity, and the research on transliterated words, including the definitions, classification and characteristics, morpheme study and their prospects. Next this thesis introduces the special procedures of transliterating English into Chinese and concludes the status quo of character selection in transliterated words.Then this thesis attempts to give a detailed analysis of restrictive factors of character selection in E-C transliteration. The linguistic characteristics and Chinese culture influence the character selection in practice. English and Chinese differs in phonology and scripts, which cause a lot of troubles in translitering English into Chinese. It is not easy to use Chinese to transcribe English words sometimes because the syllabic structures of both languages are different and the quantity of syllables in Chinese is much less than that in English. And it is complicated to use Chinese characters to write out the corresponding transliterated words for the source words because there are too many polyphones and polysemy characters in Chinese vocabulary. There are too many options of transcription and characters to transliterate the source words. Moreover there are other factors which influence the character selection in transliteration like time and space, social and cultural factors, subjective and objective factors of translators and language users.And then the author of this thesis puts forwards four principles of character selection in transliteration, i.e. closeness, simplicity, association and convergence, and some suggestions on the norms of character selection in transliteration to translators, language users and the Language and Character Administration Department.Finally, the author summarizes the whole study on transliteration and transliterated words and the norms and lists the major findings of this thesis. It also concludes the limitations.