A Comparative Research On Information Equivalent Texts In Chinese And English Based On High And Low Context Theory

In the process of cross-cultural communication, people are always comparing onelanguage with another, the meaning, the structure, and the tone, verbal or non-verbal, inorder to achieve successful information exchange. People engaged in English languagestudying often have such experience that for the same passage, or the same book, theEnglish version is much longer than the Chinese one. Then what leads to the difference inlength? What is the ratio of length between the Chinese and English version of the samecontent? Is there a rule concerning texts on different subjects? And what are the roots thatcause this language phenomenon? If we can correctly understand the differences andreasons, and grasp the basic features of language, it will surely be helpful for us to bettermaster the language and improve the cross-cultural communication. It is hoped that theconclusions we have summed up from the data in the case study will be to some extentuseful to the translation practice between English and Chinese, and that the study as awhole will also be of some value to the further contrastive study of English and Chinesetexts.In view of this, based on the previous studies on this subject and the High and Lowtheory, this thesis, by analyzing the specific ratio of length difference of English andChinese texts, intends to make a further study of the social and cultural roots that causethis difference. In order to do so, the author decided to make a case study of sometranslation works between Chinese and English in the form of a small corpus. The worksthat have been chosen for case study in this thesis are articles from the12issues in2012of the monthly magazine “the World of English”. This magazine was first published byone the China’s oldest press, the Commercial Press, in1981. It was the first bilingualmagazine for English learning in China. The edition of the magazine received greatsupport from many well-known linguists, translators and scholars.By intent comparison and analysis of the information equivalent translation works inChinese and English, the author discovered a series of different features of Chinese andEnglish language and reached the conclusion that the difference in language forms is determined by different thinking patterns. Different ways of thinking are resulted from theinfluence of philosophy, value systems and contexts in different cultures.