| Since the 1990s, with the development of the second generation of large-scale corpora, corpus-based research on "Translation Universals" has gradually become one of the most important topics in Translation Studies. A great many studies have been done to testify the related hypotheses of Translation Universals. This concept was first proposed by Mona Baker as the universal features of translation, "that is features which typically occur in translated text rather than original utterances and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic systems" (Baker 1993:243). That is to say, all translations are inclined to show certain linguistic features simply by means of being translated. These features, in this sense, are specific to translated texts.Empirical studies based on comparable translational and non-translational corpora have demonstrated supportive evidence for some Translation Universals features, such as Explicitation, Simplification, Normalization, Under-representation of Target Language specific items and Source Language Interference, etc. Yet, most studies in this area have been restricted on the one hand to translational English translated from European languages which are closely related to English in many aspects, and on the other, limited to certain genres or text types. If these features are to be generalized as "Translation Universals", it is important to find forceful support from some distinct languages such as Chinese and English. Since people find that corpus-based study will give more explicit and empirical evidence to study Translation Universals, this investigation will adopt this new methodology to find out the commonalities and differences based on four corpora respectively representing British English (FLOB), native Chinese (LCMC), translated English (COTE) and translated Chinese (ZCTC).Four registers are included in the corpora mentioned above:news, academic prose, general prose and fiction. General prose includes five genres (i.e. religious writing, skills, trades and hobbies, popular lore, biographies and essays, and reports and official documents) which contribute 41.2% of the whole register. Previous studies on Translation Universals have paid much attention to literary registers such as fiction and to the general tendencies of translational language as a whole, but less emphasis is put on specific registers, particularly, general prose—which is the biggest part in the four corpora and frequently used in daily life. Meanwhile, most studies focus on comparison between source texts and translated texts instead of two translation variations. This thesis will present a corpus-based study of commonalities and differences in translated Chinese and translated English general prose. Through the crosslingual analyses and comparisons based on comparable translational and non-translational Chinese or English corpora, this paper is trying to verify the hypothesis of Translation Universals both in English and Chinese general prose and hence justify the independent status of Translation Studies.The results show that translational Chinese and English general prose shares a number of common properties. For example, both translational Chinese and English general prose has lower lexical density and more function words, which lead to the supportive evidence of Simplification and Explicitation hypotheses; frequently used words appear more in both of the two translational variations which is an evidence to support the Normalization hypothesis. But some hypotheses are not supported in both of the translational variations, for example, the use of by passive construction in original English general prose is much more frequently than that in translational English general prose, which can be regarded as a symbol that is against Normalization hypothesis. Therefore the English-based Translation Universal hypotheses are not necessarily supported by both of the translation variations. Fresh evidence are needed to testify the Translation Universals hypotheses. |
PDF Full Text Request