Translating Chinese Ba-construction In Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out:an Approach Of Translation Shifts

Ba-construction is a basic syntactic pattern in modern Chinese. As one of the characteristic grammatical phenomena, it is complex in structure and frequently used in modern Chinese. Thus, it has attracted much attention from linguistic scholars. Previous studies are mainly on the syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features of Ba-construction, but little attention is paid to the translation of it. Furthermore, there is no single, fixed sentence pattern corresponding with Ba-construction in English. Therefore, translation shifts inevitably occurs in the translation of Ba-construction, and translation shifts studies intend to systematically describe and classify the linguistic changes occurring in translation from source language to target language.This study on Ba-construction and its English translation is based on a Chinese novel and Howard Goldblatt’s translation of this novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The study aims to analyze Ba-construction and the available English realizations in the novel so as to find out the translation shifts on various levels and unveil the reasons of these shifts. Firstly, Ba-construction in this novel is sorted out. classified into ten types according to its characteristics. Then, the translation shifts on various levels of Ba-construction are analyzed with the help of Catford’s translation shifts framework. Due to the reasons that structure shifts is one of the most frequent used category shifts, and it entails class shifts in some cases, the thesis focus on the analysis of structure shifts.According to the calculation, there are936sentences containing Ba-construction in the novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. And the basic structure of Ba-construction is "Ba+O+V". On the foundation of the basic structure, other elements like attribute, adverbial modifier, complement, object can enter the construction. According to the study, the English structures SVO and "SVO+PP." are often used to express the meaning of Ba-construction. Of course, level shifts and category shifts still occur in the two structures according to the concrete situation in the novel. On the basis of different situational elements and language varieties, Ba-construction may be realized in different ways. In some cases, it can be omitted, or fused with the context. Translation should not only take linguistic differences into consideration, but also the non-linguistic reasons. Among the non-linguistic factors which may influence translation, the thesis discusses the situational reasons and language varieties briefly, hoping it will do some help to the future studies on the translation of Ba-construction.