The Redistribution Of Semantic Information In English-Chinese Translation

This thesis probes into the redistribution of semantic information in English-Chinese translation, taking the Chinese version of The Story of Patsy by American novelist Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, translated by the author, as the research material.At first, general knowledge about the development and basic theories of semantic orientation and valence grammar is introduced. It is Chinese grammarians who launched the concept of semantic orientation and developed its related theories. Semantic orientation means the relationship of one constituent in a context orienting to another constituent. It is a concept in linguistics and can be used to study sentences at a much deeper stratum, which provides a very powerful explanation of linguistic facts. Valence grammar was founded by French linguist L. Tesniere in the1950s and later introduced to Chinese grammar study by Zhu Dexi. Valence refers to the dependency between a verb and a certain number of noun phrases. It describes how many noun phrases a verb can govern.In the second part, this thesis explores five strategies for redistributing semantic information in English-Chinese translation. These five strategies are1) semantic reorienting, which means to render the modified word at the semantic level, not the one at the syntactic level;2) semantic shift, which means to adjust semantic information in the target text to make it more readable;3) semantic blending, which means to use less syntactic components in the target text than those in the source text to convey the same meaning;4) semantic separation, which means to bring out the hidden meaning in the source text in translation;5) semantic case transformation, which means the valence of a word in the source text will change when translated into the target text. Finally, this thesis summarizes specific translation methods in order to provide a possible new perspective for English-Chinese translation.