Readability Analysis Of The Translations For The Han Official Titles In Shi Ji

Translating Chinese historical classics into English is an effective way of intercultural communication between China and the Western countries. Readability analysis of translation terms for Chinese classics is very important in translation studies on classics. Proposing a more comprehensive set of pairs in term translation is also vital. Because of the complexity of term translation, term translation faces great challenges in Chinese historical classic translation. These challenges contain the difficulty of term translation, great discrepancies of term translation pairs among different translations, and discrepancies of readability for translation pairs. So term translation studies emphasizes the analysis of translation readability, which is the fundamental task in Chinese classic translation studies.The thesis investigates the translation readability for the Han official titles in Shi Jis three English versions, which were rendered by Burton Watson, William H. Nienhauser, Jr. and Yang Xianyi respectively. It analyses readability against the five measurements of word or phrasal form, word length, word frequency, word style and transliteration. COCA and BNC are used as referential corpora for word frequency. Based on the readability formulae, such as the Flesch Reading Ease Readability Formula, the Fog-Index Formula, the Fry Graph Readability Formula, the SMOG Readability Formula, the Dale-Chall Readability Formula and the Bog index, this paper demonstrates the characteristics and readability of the Han official titles in Shi Ji through quantitative and qualitative analysis.It is mainly made up of five parts. The first chapter discusses the basic concept of translation readability. The second chapter reviews translation studies on Han official titles. The third chapter introduces word readability measurements. The fourth chapter presents readability discrepancies among the translations for the Han official titles in Shi Ji. The fifth chapter analyzes the readability discrepancies of the translations for the Han official titles in ShiJi.It has been discovered that Watson’s translations for the Han official titles in Shi Ji are more readable than Nienhauser’s translations. Compared with Watson’s translations, Nienhauser’s translation words are generally more academic. They tend to be pre-modern vacabulary. Watson’s translations use more contemporary spoken English than Nienhauser’s translations. It can be concluded that translators could enhance the translation readability in term translation by using compound words rather than phrases, words of no more than two syllables, higher frequency words rather than lower frequency words, more modern words rather than archaic words, non-transliteration words rather than transliteration words.