Analysis Of Modal Verb Transformation In The Translation Of Great Expectations

Word class is a kernel concept in traditional English grammar. It must be used under strict rules which may have negative effects on stereotyped translation because of the differences between source language and target language. To realize the vividness of translation, translators need to break the bounds of the rules and shift word classes flexibly, especially in literature translation.The thesis reports the translations of the famous novel Great Expectations on lexical level. The corpus-based approach was adopted; the parallel corpus of Great Expectations was built including the English and Chinese versions with the aid of Trados. The CLAWS and Segtag software were used to tag the corpora and the Perl language to compute the frequencies of four modal verbs can, could, may and might.The following conclusions are reached from the study:1. The modal verb can is translated into6word classes:modal verbs, full verbs, adverbs, adjectives, auxiliaries and nouns in order of frequency. The percentages of them are51.16%,9.30%,2.91%,1.74%and0.58%respectively.2. The modal verb could is translated into7word classes:modal verbs, full verbs, adverbs, auxiliaries, adjectives, nouns and conjunctions in order of frequency. The percentages of them are38.96%,13.05%,6.14%,2.11%,1.54%,0.77%and0.38%respectively.3. The modal verb may is translated into5word classes:modal verbs, adverbs, full verbs, conjunctions, and interjections in order of frequency. The percentages of them are42.24%,16.15%,6.83%,3.11%and1.24%respectively.4. The modal verb might is translated into5word classes:modal verbs, adverbs, full verbs, adjectives, and interjections in order of frequency. The percentages of them are32.14%,17.86%,9.38%,2.23%and0.45%respectively.5. Five most frequent transformed word classes are modal verbs, full verbs, adverbs, auxiliaries and adjectives. The percentages of them are39.98%,10.76%,9.55%,1.21%and1.21%respectively. The translations of the modal group can, could, may and might have realized the equivalence of meaning and modality with the source language by flexible word class transformations and other translation techniques. The translation theory of back-transformation of Nida and the concept of translation shifts of Catford offer rational and satisfactory explanations on the word class transformation in the translation of the novel Great Expectations. The rationality and applicability of the transformation theory as the guideline for the novel translation studies are shown and proved in the research.