On Translators’s Awareness Of Semantic Prosody On The Basis Of The Translation Of Government Work Report And White Paper

In this thesis, the corpus will be set up consisting the translation of GovernmentWork Report (2002-2009) and White Paper of the past12years (2000-2011), with thepurpose to check the semantic prosody of “caused”,“persistent”,“committed”,“outbreak/broke out”,“alleviate/alleviated”,“happened/occur”,“result/consequences”and “rather/fairly”, with reference to the semantic prosody of the above-mentionedwords provided in the relevant articles, by extracting examples from self-built corpusthrough the software (here refers to ConcApp). It is under the hypothesis that thetranslators will usually turn to the dictionaries where they try to find the closeequivalents in the target language, but no or less semantic prosody of lexical items isprovided. Thus the translators may produce prosodic clash, because they are unawareof semantic prosody or ignorant of semantic prosody. Finally it is found that thetranslators lack awareness of semantic prosody of certain words, with prosodic clasharising in their translation, such as, the word of “persistent”, which collocates with“efforts” and “hard work”.As for those above-mentioned government files (hereinafter referred toGovernment Work Report and White Paper), political consciousness is not onlyrequired, but also the awareness of semantic prosody should be intensified, whichneed to expose to more original English. In addition, those kinds of governmentdocuments have their own features, such as, culture-specific items (i.e. four-wordstructure). So translators should also focus on the difference in culture and expression,in order to ensure the quality of translation and acceptability of the translated files bythe English-speaking readers or listeners. Only in this way, can China communicatewith other countries in the world without much misunderstanding.