A Study On Semantic Prosody In Chinese-english Translations

As an important topic in modern corpus linguistics, semantic prosody hasbecome a matter of great concern for scholars both at home and abroad. It refers to akind of semantic aura caused by a special type of collocation. Due to the consistentcollocation with linguistic items which have a certain sentimental color some wordsbecome gradually imbued with that sentiment. The consistent co-occurrence of theselinguistic items forms a specific semantic aura through which the speaker or authorexpresses opinions, attitudes and evaluation. Starting from the perspective of semanticprosody, this thesis explores a contrastive study among three translated versions (byYang Xianyi&Gladys Yang, William A. Lyell, Julia Lovell respectively) of LuXun’s“A Madman’s Diary”, trying to measure the extent to which different translators haveconveyed the sentiment and attitude Lu Xun expressed in the original text. Besides,this thesis also tries to recommend different translated versions to different levels ofreaders according to the analysis of semantic prosody.This study adopts both a data-driven approach and manual analysis in theclassification of semantic prosody in concrete contexts. Firstly,“brother”,“flesh”,“eyes”,“children”,“son” and “eat” are selected as node words with the help ofAntConc. Then, node words are retrieved from their specific contexts so that theirsemantic prosodies can be observed and classified into different categories. Here, theresults can be compared with the original text and thus we can know whether there aredisparities between translated versions and the original text as to the node words’semantic prosodies. The study further investigates the node words’semantic prosodiesin British National Corpus. Comparing the results drawn from the native corpus withtranslated versions’, similarities and discrepancies then show up. Besides, this thesisalso studies the semantic prosodies of two groups of synonyms, exploring translators’interference in their work.The results show that Yang Xianyi&Gladys Yang’s version is the most faithfulone to the original text. However, it is produced several decades ago and the languageis somewhat outdated. Therefore, it is more suitable for readers with research purposes. William A. Lyell’s translation, which is written in modernAmericanEnglish,not only delivers the accurate meaning of the original text but also conveys its subtlesentiment and attitude. Thus it is considered appropriate for common readers as wellas scholars. Julia Lovell’s version, though it discords with the original text in someplaces, conveys the original text’s meaning in general. The concise language style andintense conflict all make it better accepted by common readers.What’s more, this thesis happens to confirmMichael Stubbs’ idea about semanticprosody: some words have a predominantly negative prosody, a few have a positiveprosody, and many words are neutral in this respect. Meanwhile, this thesis verifiesLouw’s hypothesis that the usage of abnormal collocation might achieve satiricaleffects.This study has creatively combined the study of semantic prosody withtranslation and adopted various methods to conduct both quantitative and qualitativeanalysis, which will shed some light on later studies.