A Corpus-based Descriptive Study On The Translation Of High-Frequency Adjectives In International Maritime Conventions

In modern society, the communications and trades among countries become more and more frequent; meanwhile, shipping has become the most important way of international trades. The international maritime conventions are regulated and enacted by the international maritime organization, in order to ensure the development of maritime business. As a result, the precise translation of maritime conventions is extraordinarily significant for the development of shipping business in China.Because maritime conventions belong to legal English, which must be precise, formal and impersonal, so adjectives account for a low proportion in it. While adjectives can express an attitude and a feeling, therefore, the precise translation of adjectives is difficult but important. The thesis aims to find some rules and principles in the translation of high-frequency adjectives in international maritime conventions by applying both quantitative and qualitative methods.The present study applies the research methodology of corpus linguistics. A parallel corpus was built on the basis of a 230,000-word text of international maritime conventions with the help of Trados.1125 English adjectives and 345 Chinese adjectives were extracted by Perl programs. Combined with Nida’s functional equivalence theory, the following conclusions are reached after quantitative and qualitative analysis:1. There are 1125 English adjectives in international maritime conventions, and 1096 of them are general adjectives, which account for 97.42% of all the English adjectives used here; There are 345 Chinese adjectives in international maritime conventions, and 231 of them are general adjectives, which account for 66.96% of all the Chinese adjectives used here.2. other ranks first and appears 733 times in the English text of the international maritime conventions, which accounts for 65.16% of all the English adjectives used here.适当ranks first and appears 226 times in the Chinese text of international maritime conventions, which accounts for 65.51% of all Chinese adjectives used here.3. There exist some patterns in the translation of high-frequency adjectives in international maritime conventions. For example:safety are all translated into安全的,fully are all translated into完全的,these patterns are frequently used in the translation of different types of adjectives.4. Dynamic equivalence is not applied in the translation of high-frequency adjectives of international maritime conventions; they all applied formal equivalence method,99.71% of the high-frequency adjectives are translated directly, which shows the translation of high-frequency adjectives in international maritime conventions follows the principle of faithfulness.