Lexical Features In Howard Goldblatt’s Translations

Promoted by the combination of corpus linguistics and translation studies,corpus-based translation studies have been an important part in the empirical studies.Since the introduction of translation universals, the existence and the concerningfeatures have increasingly been the core issues in corpus-based translation studies.Linguist Mona Baker suggests that translated texts possess an intrinsic feature calledtranslation universals, which indicates that translation language generally shows someregular language features which are different from source language and targetlanguage. Many sub-hypotheses constitute the translation universals hypothesis,among which the main three are simplification, explicitation and normalization.Simplification refers that translators will consciously or subconsciously simplifythe language or information or even both in translated texts, manifested by the simplerlanguage in comparison with the original texts of the same language, such as the morenarrow range of vocabulary used, less variation in lexis or the decrease in informationload. Explicitation means that the implied information in the source texts gets definedin the translated texts, which could be achieved by the addition of conjunctions orextra explanation. Normalization is the tendency to comply with the features orpractice of target language, even to the point of exaggerating them. In other words,translators incline to eliminate the specific characteristics in source language in orderto make translated texts more normal.Since Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by virtue of theEnglish version of Sheng Si Pi Lao (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out), its Englishtranslator, sinologist Howard Goldblatt and his translation works gradually turn to bethe hot research subjects in the eyes of many scholars. The current study is to buildthe Goldblatt’s Translation Corpus based on his four translations, taking the self-built Original English Corpus as reference, aiming at the investigation of lexical features inGoldblatt’s translation and the confirmation of the existence of translation universals.The specific questions are as follows:Question1: Do translation universals exist in Goldblatt’s translation?Question2: What are the lexical features in Goldblatt’s translation from theperspectives of simplification, explicitation and normalization?Question3: What factors can be used to explain the translation universalsmanifested in the English translation by Goldblatt?To deal with the three questions above, the present paper is conducted byanalyzing the descriptive statistics for simplification, explicitation and normalizationin a quantitative and qualitative approach. And the findings are listed below:1. Seen from statistics, there is no lexical simplification in Goldblatt’s translation.The lexical density, lexical variety and the proportion of lexical words in texts arehigher than those in the original English texts, demonstrating that his translations havea wide range of vocabulary, and the texts are various in vocabulary and rich in content.The frequency of logical conjunctions is slightly lower than that in original Englishtexts, showing there is no obvious explicitation in the use of logical conjunctionscompared with original English. And the frequency of reformulation markers ishigher, indicating the explicitation of implied meaning. But when translating fromChinese to English, there does exist explicitation in logical relationships. Thenormalization is reflected by the similar patterns of nominalization and thecollocations of parts of speech in both two self-built corpora.2. In terms of the lexical features, the translated texts are various in vocabularies,rich in information and fluent in structure. And the translator prefers so, but, in orderto and in order word in texts. And with the time changing, the lexical features inGoldblatt’s translation are close to those in original English.3. The good command of both Chinese and English, the differences of languagestructures and cultures and the creativity in translation may be adopted to explain suchuniversals manifested in Goldblatt’s translations.According to the findings above, the current paper indicates some implications: Theoretically, the studies on translation universals in Chinese-English translationare enriched; methodologically, on the basis of statistics, factors like life experience,social culture and readers and market are adopted in the qualitative analysis,providing complement for the simple quantitative approach as well as the quantitativeanalysis on Goldblatt’s translations; practically, through the comparison betweentranslated texts and texts of the target language as well as the examples, it helps tounderstand the language features in translation language and target language,providing the guidance for translation practice.