A Contrastive Study Of Causal Conjunctions In The Two Chinese Translations Of Steve Jobs

The present research is a contrastive study of the ways in which the two Chinese translations, namely the Mainland translation and the Taiwan translation of Steve Jobs deal with causal conjunctions of the English source text. The study is motivated by readers’totally different comments on the two Chinese translations of the biography of Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and former CEO. Generally speaking, the Taiwan translation has won the favor of most readers while strong criticism has been aroused concerning the Mainland translation for its "translationese".As an essential way to construct text, cohesion is the basis of text formation like a tangible network embodied on the level of surface structure as well as text comprehension. And the use of conjunctions, one kind of cohesive devises, is quite different in Chinese and English. To put it simply, conjunctions are generally less frequently used in Chinese than in English, as is determined by the fact that Chinese is a more paratactic language while English is a more hypotactic one. Therefore, in this thesis, the different ways concerning the use of causal conjunctions of the two translations of Steve Jobs as well as the possible reasons for the distinctions are explored both quantitatively and qualitatively, in hope to prove one of the possible reasons for the popularity of the Taiwan translation among readers and the complaint about the Mainland translation from readers is that the latter does reveal traces of translationese in terms of the usage of causal conjunctions. The major findings of the study are as follows:First, causal conjunctions are more frequently used in the Mainland translation than in the Taiwan translation.Second, the different frequency of causal conjunctions used in the two translations can be attributed to the tendency that the implicitation strategy of causal conjunctions is adopted more frequently in the Taiwan translation than that in the Mainland translation.Third, both the results of the quantitative study and the qualitative study show that the Taiwan translation is more conformable to the features’ of the Chinese language, which is probably caused by the fact that the Taiwan version’s translators may be more aware of the different characteristics of the source language and target language concerning the use of conjunctions. Thus, the reason why the Mainland translation is less popular among readers than the Taiwan translation probably lies in the fact that in terms of handling causal conjunctions, the Mainland translation’s adequacy translation strategy fails to yield a more natural translation with less translationese.To sum up, the thesis analyzes the difference in the use of causal conjunctions of the two Chinese translations of Steve Jobs both quantitatively and qualitatively, and explored the possible reasons behind the difference. It is hoped that the present study can make some contributions to the researches on both the theory and practice of translation of conjunctions, and bring inspirations to the future studies.