On Meaning Shifts In C-E Novel Translation

Translation, an important way of intercultural communication, involves faithfully transferring themeaning from source language to target language. However, various linguistic and non-linguisticfactors are involved in the process of translating activity, such as language, culture, translator’ssubjectivity, text type, etc. Therefore, the translator needs to take into consideration all these factors soas to give the target readers a satisfactory translated version. Since meaning is very complex andimportant, this thesis mainly dwells on one important aspect of translation: meaning shift. So far,some researches have been done in this respect both at home and abroad. However, most researchesfocus on several examples randomly; there are seldom corpus-based investigation of a whole noveland its different translated versions. This thesis randomly selects two chapters among twenty four andbuilds corpora to make a comprehensive comparison and statistical analysis of meaning shifts whichoccur in the two English translations of Luotuoxiangzi, attempting to provide a supplement to theprevious studies.Based on the theoretical framework of meaning classification put forward by Leech, in this paper,meaning shifts in translation refer to departure from conceptual meaning of words in source text,choosing their associative meaning or structural meaning to convey meaning in target text. Withreference to previous studies, this thesis put forward a hypothesis that there exist certain regularitiesof the meaning shift between Chinese and English texts of Luotuoxiangzi. And these regularities areinfluenced by various factors which can be accounted for to some degree. This thesis explores ninetypes of meaning shifts: substitution&neutralization of the literary image, specification&generalization, widening&narrowing, intensification&weakening, intratextual explanation. Byadopting both qualitative and quantitative approaches, this thesis intends to observe the diversity ofmeaning shift in two different languages and reveals the deep reasons for translator’s strategyselection. It can provide some meaningful reference for translators in their dealing with word meaningin C-E translation.Through statistic and empirical analysis, the following findings are reached:1) There are356and296meaning shifts respectively in Shi’s version and King’s version and the same9types ofmeaning shift exist, including substitution, neutralization of literary image, specification&generalization, widening&narrowing, intensification&weakening, intratextual explanation.Substitution is the most prevailing and basic type of meaning shifts both in Shi’s and King’s version.2)As to three pairs of binary opposition, Shi Xiaojing uses more meaning shifts of generalization whileEvan King uses more meaning shifts of specification. Intensification is more used than weakening both in two versions. The pair of widening&narrowing is less common. Meaning shifts ofintratextual explanation are more used in King’s version than those in Shi’s version.3) Meaning shiftsin C-E novel translation are conditioned by various factors, among which languages, cultures,translator’s subjectivity are the most important and influential ones.4) Being subjective, meaningshift should be used properly. Otherwise, the source text meaning may be distorted and target readerswill be certainly confused.