A Self-built-corpora Based Study Of Translation Universals In The English Translation Of The Report On The Work Of The Government

The Report on the Work of the Government (the RWG), delivered annually by Chinese Premier during the opening meeting of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, expounds the work of the central government on various aspects in the past year and frames the guidelines for government work in the coming year, serving as an important showcase of a fast developing China to the rest of the world. Hence the translation of the RWG has been treated as an ideal drilling rig from which all kinds of discussion and analyses will pump out.The series of hypotheses of the universal features of translation, ever since its coming-into-being1993in one of the masterpieces of Mona Baker—Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications, has been the battlefield of conflicting ideas in the circle of translation study. Baker (1993:243) refered universals of translation as linguistic features which typically occur in translated rather than original texts and they are thought to be independent of the influence of the specific language pairs involved in the process of translation. As a new paradigm booming in the circle, corpus-based approach, be it helps verifying or challenging the hypotheses, has shed light on the studies of universals of translation. Nevertheless, most of the studies conducted by far dealt with the translations of literary texts in languages of Indo-European family, the diversity of the type of the text and the language in discussion as variables being in want of more attention. In view of this, the study is carried out in attempt to test the hypotheses in the English version of the RWG, a Chinese political discourse, with the assistance of corpus analyzing softwares. In this study, the author tries to attain the verification or falsification of the hypotheses of universals of translation from both the macroscopic and the microscopic views. To be specific, in this study, hypotheses of three types of universals of translation, namely explicitation, simplification and levelling out, which take the employment of conjunctions, the frequency of emergence of personal pronoun subject, the core patterns of lexical use, the syntactic features and variances of the Type/Token Ratio and mean sentence length in different parts of the English translation of the RWG of2011as their expressions, are tested by comparing the translated text with both its source text and its counterpart in original English—State of the Union Address made by president George W. Bush from2005to2009. WordList Concord tools of WordSmith3.0are utilized to make Wordlists and Concordance lists, which ensure the effectiveness of the collection of quantitative data indicating what characterizes the English translation of the RWG of2011when compared with the reference corpus consisting of State of the Union Address. The part-of-speech parser and frequency list tool of LING-JOIN Parser1are employed to process the source text in Chinese and output correspondent quantitative data to enable the comparison between the source text and its English translation. And the counting tool of Microsoft Word, an online source of the CLAWS, a tagging tool for the part of speech, and some other online statistic tools also contribute to the statistics. The findings of this study are that both two hypotheses of explicitation, that is to say, the overuse of conjunction and the low-frequency use of personal pronoun subjects are falsified; the one of lexical density out of the four hypotheses of lexical simplification and the hypothesis of syntactical simplification are proved to be of no tenability in the translated text; a significant betrayal from the hypothesis of leveling out is observed.