Investigating The Features And Tendencies Of Translated Chinese:a Corpus-Based Case Study Of Aspect Markers

A number of studies show that the translated language (translation) is different from the source language and the target native language. Duff regards it as "the third language"(Duff1981:3), and Frawley considers it as "the third code"(Frawley1984:159). A lot of distinctive features of translated English have been uncovered. Beyond the lexical level, translated English is characterized by normalization, simplification, explicitation, and sanitization. Features of translated English such as these are sometimes called "translation universals"(TU) in the literature (Baker1993:238).Nevertheless, research of this area has so far been confined largely to the translated English which translated from closely related European languages. If the features of translated language that have been reported are to be generalized as "translation universals", the language pairs involved must not be restricted to English and closely related European languages. Clearly, evidence from "genetically" distinct language pairs such as English and Chinese is arguably more convincing, if not indispensable.This thesis adopts two kinds of corpora, i.e., Chinese monolingual comparable corpora and English-Chinese parallel corpora. It attempts to investigate the features and tendencies of translated Chinese via comparing the aspect markers in translated Chinese texts and native Chinese texts. The data show that the frequency of aspect-markers in the translated Chinese is much lower than that in the native Chinese. And the distributions of the aspect markers are different between genres. This thesis also investigates the reasons which caused the distribution difference of aspect markers in translated Chinese and native Chinese, and discusses the translation of aspectual meaning from English to Chinese.The findings include that the aspect markers distribution in the translated Chinese shows the tendency of under representation in the process of translation from English, while go against the hypothesis of normalization. The perfective aspectual meanings of English can be translated into Chinese with the following approaches, i.e., adopting the Chinese aspect markers such as "-le","-guo","yi"/"yijing", RVCs and others (which include the omission method). The omission method makes the frequency of aspect markers in translated Chinese lower than that in native Chinese.