A Corpus-Based Study On The Linguistic Features Of The Translated Chinese Children’s Literature (for Children Aged Between 12 And 18)

The translation of children’s literature in China started in the late Qing Dynasty. Later, it gained its prosperity in the 1980s. At present, translated children’s literature is still on the periphery of the literature system, leading to the imbalance of development in translation practice and theoretical studies. Compared to the flourish in the translation practice, theoretical studies are insufficient, let alone corpus-based translation studies on children’s literature. Translated children’s literature has played an important role in the shaping and development of children’s literature. Additionally, translated literary works set examples for children in language use of their mother tongue.This thesis aims to study the distinctive linguistic features of translated Chinese children’s literature in the field of descriptive translation studies. With the adoption of corpus linguistic tools, studies have been conducted on the basis of two small-scale self-built corpora:the translated Chinese children’s literature corpus and the original Chinese children’s literature corpus. Researches have been carried out mainly through the comparison of the two corpora to examine whether the distinctive linguistic features in the translated Chinese children’s literature exist or not. Later, further researches have been conducted to explore the possible reasons leading to the distinctive linguistic features in the translated Chinese children’s literature if they do exist. The reasons are exemplified mainly in three perspectives:the translation universals; the language difference between English and Chinese and the characteristics of children’s literature.Based on the research findings, the distinctive linguistic features of translated Chinese children’s literature can be described at lexical and syntactic level. On the lexical level, the major findings are:the translated Chinese children’s literature shows a lower lexical density and slightly higher lexical diversity compared to the original Chinese children’s literature. The frequency of verbs, quantifiers, one-character words, three-character words, four-character words and idioms are relatively lower in the translated Chinese children’s literature owing to the language difference between English and Chinese. On the contrary, the frequency of function words, conjunctions in particular, and pronouns are higher, which is the reflection of simplification and explicitation. The lower frequency of modal particles, onomatopoeia and reduplication in the translated Chinese children’s literature indicates a violation of norms for the creation of children’s literature. On the syntactic level, the translated Chinese children’s literature has longer syntagma, higher frequency of structure auxiliary "de" and higher frequency of Shi-construction. Unlike the previous findings of other scholars, the difference between the two corpora in the frequency of Bei-construction is not significant in this research. The linguistic features of translated Chinese children’s literature, according to the research, are resulted from the mutual influence of translation universals, language difference between English and Chinese and characteristics of children’s literature. The findings provide an in-depth view of "norms" for translation of children’s literature, which are illuminating for both translation practice and theoretical studies. The "norms" could be adopted to normalize the language use in translated Chinese children’s literature.This thesis is unavoidably subject to limitations due to the corpus-based approach applied in the research. For future researches, improvements are required in corpus building and corpus processing to build corpora with bigger size, more genres and various tagging. Besides, this research merely takes into account the linguistic features which can be quantified due to the limitation of corpus linguistic tools. Therefore, great efforts have to be made to testify the research findings and to expand upon them.