A Study Of The Ideologies In English Political Discourse Translations From The Perspective Of Semantic Prosody

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth of corpus-based translation studies that appeared in the beginning of the1990s. Linguists of all persuasions have discovered that corpora can be very useful resources for pursuing various research agendas. Corpus Linguistics has provided a new weapon for translation studies, broadening the research scope and introducing a brand-new thought pattern for translation scholars.This study examines the semantic prosodies of words found in the political lexical environment by referring to a100-million word corpus named British National Corpus (BNC). The main research perspective is semantic prosody or semantic association; the notion that words associate with collocates that are themselves related, often either negatively or positively or belonging to a specific semantic set. With a method combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, this dissertation thus studies how words in the political environment interact with each other on a semantic level and the ideological structures contributing to such interactions behind the scenes. At the very beginning, a brief introduction of the background, the rationale and significance, the purpose and objective and the organization of this study are laid out. What follows next is the literature of the studies of political discourse translation, semantic prosody and ideology. Chapter Three is about research method and procedure based on the analysis of corpus data. Chapter Four focuses on three case studies; Chapter five is the conclusion. The study shows words in the political environment do undergo some semantic swift, that is, they are usually found to be different in the pragmatic evaluative meanings compared with the typical semantic prosodies summarized from BNC. The study, in exploring the impetus to promote such semantic swifts and analyzing the relationship between semantic shift and ideological structure, reveals that ideological structures imbedded in the writers and the translators are the main driving force.It is also noted, however, that these prosodies are not all-consuming, and often only represent strong tendencies for lexical relations, rather than a firmly fixed relationship. The dissertation ends by discussing the pedagogical consequences that this research may have when the results are introduced into classrooms and the limitations still remaining in this research which may be improved in further research.