On Translation Of Function Words In Six Chapters Of A Floating Life From The Perspective Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

Based on C-E parallel corpus, the study of function words’ rendering in Six Chapters of A Floating Life from the standpoint of Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation is intended to shed some light on Lin Yutang’s translation studies from various perspectives, to yield a few basic findings in the translation of function words and also to work as a try in exploring flexible approaches in translating and publicizing fine Chinese culture in21st century.Written in Qing Dynasty, Six Chapters of A Floating Life carries typical features of classical Chinese, where function words hold a large proportion and make the finishing point of the whole text. Hence, how to translate the function words of Six Chapters of A Floating Life into English without losing the flavor of original text becomes an indispensable content of Lin Yutang’s C-E translation. This study will focus on modality particles, prepositions and conjunctions, in view of the characteristics of Six Chapters of A Floating Life and the fact that most books on grammar today regard these three kinds of words as function words.Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theories impenetrate this study. According to Newmark’s text typology and translation theories, Six Chapters of A Floating Life will most likely fall into the category of "expressive" texts, so semantic translation should be the main approach. Hence, we suppose that most function words in Six Chapters of A Floating Life are translated on the ground of semantic translation instead of communicative translation.A C-E parallel corpus of Six Chapters of A Floating Life is built and three modality particles(“乎”、“哉”、“噫”),one preposition(“以”)and one conjunction(“以”)are selected and tagged at three levels in respect of the part of speech, meaning and the translation inclination of these words. With a relative standard, frequencies of inclination to semantic translation or to communicative translation are calculated. The results, nevertheless, does not correspond with the assumption:all of the translations of18meanings of5words have more inclination to communicative translation than semantic translation except2meanings of preposition’‘以”and2meanings of conjunction“以”.The study finds out that, firstly, if the counterpart of the Chinese function word can be easily found in English, the translation method tends to be semantic translation, for example,“以”,used as a conjunction to indicate the causal relation between two sentences, is usually translated into "because","on the ground that","hence", etc. Secondly, if it is impossible to find the counterpart of the function word in English, the translation would have more preference to communicative translation and employ mainly the following four types of changes:addition, conversion, combination and cohesion. It is concluded that, in the case of translating function words in Six Chapters of A Floating Life, we would better describe semantic translation as the basic approach rather than the main approach.Due to the length and time limitation, however, this study only covers limited function words. Therefore, it would be imperative and necessary for a further study to cover more renditions of function words in Six Chapters of A Floating Life, so the research result would be more representative and valuable.