A Tentative Study On The Translations Of New Chinese Word Families As Headwords In Chinese-English Dictionaries

With the rapid economic and social development, there have emerged many neologisms in the Chinese language. Chinese neologisms include both words and phrases. The newness of a neologism lies in its semantic and pragmatic newness in a specific space and historical period. As a result under specific historical conditions, neologisms tend to evolve into ordinary words after being used frequently and widely accepted by the general public. The economy principle in language use, the conceptual metaphor in human cognition of words and expressions, and the common mentality in pursuit of individuality and diversity shared by all members in a society today, have altogether contributed to the birth of neologisms and the obsolescence of old words. Among those neologisms, we have also seen a certain trend that lots of neologisms tend to appear in groups. They usually share the same Chinese character, word, or phrase and combine the shared lexical elements with other words to form a considerable number of neologism groups. The shared lexical elements have the same or relatively similar meanings across all the words in the same group and at the same time the words of the group are structured in the same way of word formation such as "modifier-modified" structure, "subject-predicate" structure, etc, demonstrating a kinship between each other. In this thesis, we call these flocking Chinese neologisms as New Chinese Word Families.As the international exchanges China has with the other countries increase, it is no longer surprising to see Chinese people immersing themselves in English learning, foreigners eager to learn Chinese and the increased translation activities between English and Chinese every day. The increasing demand for cross-cultural communications has given rise to the dramatic increase of production of interlingual dictionaries. Revision of dictionaries now is much faster than years ago and collecting neologisms is what those new editions are keen about. Chinese-English dictionaries (hereinafter as C-E dictionaries) are bilingual dictionaries whose main purpose is to serve those who have the need of understanding Chinese terms in English and those in need of translating Chinese terms into English. Compared with monolingual Chinese dictionaries that mainly explain what a lexical item signifies and provide encyclopedic knowledge, C-E dictionaries as bilingual dictionaries are focused more often than not on "providing interlingual lexical equivalents" (Hartmann,1989:9), in other words, to provide the equivalent English translations for the Chinese terms collected in a C-E dictionary. However, different from general translations that are comparatively more flexible, translating words and sample sentences in dictionaries abides by many constraints. Dictionary translation is more conservative and a dictionary translator or a bilingual lexicographer in this sense has to translate a word or a phrase precisely even though no specific contextual information is provided. He or she must be a translator who has good knowledge of all the possible uses of a word or a phrase so as to be able to provide a translation that can well cover the semantic scope of the word or the phrase. Precision in translation is hard to achieve fully yet it is also due to such a difficulty in this task that has brought about significance in carrying out studies of this topic.This paper is a practical study on the translations of new Chinese word families in the context of C-E dictionaries. The focus is put on how to provide good translations for those word families as headwords in a C-E dictionary. It first expounds the concept of a New Chinese Word Family (hereinafter as NCWF) through an in-depth discussion on the definition, categorization and factors of emergence of NCWFs. After that, it carries out a detailed analysis on C-E dictionaries from a functional perspective, pointing out that it is the main task of a C-E dictionary to provide translations on Chinese terms. Basically, there are two levels of translation in dictionary translation, namely headword translation and sample sentence translation. On the level of headword translation which is also what we discuss in this paper, providing interlingual lexical equivalents stands as a kind of criteria in judging if a translation is precise or not. The author lists the forms of interlingual lexical equivalents and elaborates much on the dimensions of interlingual equivalence. Following the discussion, the author proposes the idea of insertibility in dealing with headword translation in a bilingual dictionary. The author thinks the notion of insertibility by nature is in consistency with the idea of interlingual equivalence in translation practice. However, compared with interlingual equivalence, insertibility is more applicable. It can be understood as an applicable interlingual equivalence. After elaborating much on the idea of insertibility, the author finally proposes some practical principles with insertibility as the core part in dealing with the translation of NCWFs in C-E dictionaries and to apply the theoretical findings into practice, the paper ends the whole discussion by a case study on the translations of 56 word families collected by Xinhua Dictionary of Neologisms.