A Study Of Vague Numerals And The Translation In Chinese Idioms Of The New Year’s Sacrifice

In1979, Professor Wu Tieping firstly introduced vague theory to China. Since then, the research on vague language begins among the Chinese scholars. Many scholars’ researches at home and abroad have covered the vague language in English idioms and are something of an expert on vague numerals. But few of them could make a research on the combination of Chinese literary works and vague numerals in idioms.Lu Hsun is an outstanding writer, revolutionist and thinker in China. His literary works and spirit are precious cultural legacy of our nation and the sufficiently valuable cultural legacy to the world. Therefore, research on Lu Hsun not only has national significance but also the universal significance. The short story, The New Year’s Sacrifice is the masterpiece by Lu Hsun. Through the analysis of vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, the author of the thesis discusses the differences and similarities between vague numerals in Chinese and English, its cultural factors and the functions of vague numerals strengthen readers’further understanding of the cultural connotation conveyed from the work by analyzing the translation instances of The New Year’s Sacrifice.By using Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory, the author of the thesis analyzes the vague numerals in idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, their translation strategies and principles and discovers the features of vague numerals in idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice and also the features of Yang Xianyi’s translation. The author of this thesis first introduces the current research of vague numerals in Chinese at home and abroad and the related research of the Functional Equivalence Theory by domestic scholars. Then a specific introduction of vague numerals and functional equivalence are introduced. Specifically speaking, the thesis introduces the research background, research purpose, and research subject and research procedure in the first chapter. In the second chapter, it introduces the translation studies of vague words in Chinese idioms at home and abroad and the application of Functional Equivalence Theory in translation studies in China. The third chapter gives a brief introduction to vague numerals and the Functional Equivalence Theory. In the forth chapter, the author of the thesis analyzes the vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice from the perspective of functional equivalence which includes the study of vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, the features and classification of vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, the translation study of vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice which introduces the translation strategies in Yang Xianyi’s translation and also the principles in translation.Through the research on the vague numerals in Chinese idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, this thesis discovers that Yang Xianyi’s translation uses different translation strategies to deal with the vague numerals in idioms of The New Year’s Sacrifice, for instance, preservation of the numerals, replacement of numerals, and omission of numerals, in another word, paraphrase or the free-form translation. In the perspective of function, it realizes the equivalence with the source text. This thesis proposes that considering the differences between English and Chinese cultures, the understanding and expression of semantic meaning of vague numerals in idioms are not all the same. In order to make the translation more faithful to the original content, more fluent in the sentences, more appropriate in style, two principles have to be considered, i.e., principles of nationality and popularity.