A Corpus-based Study Of Translation Universals In Translated English From Chinese Literary Works

This thesis attempts to conduct a corpus-based research on translation universals (known as TUs) of translated English from Chinese literary works. Generally accepted TUs hypotheses include expliciation hypothesis, simplification hypothesis, normalization hypothesis and leveling out hypothesis. As the development of this new emerging field, new linguistic features of translational languages have been added into TUs. However, research of TUs has been done based on translational English which is translated from related European languages. Some verify TUs hypotheses and others falsify them. The question remains:if these linguistic features of translational languages can be called "universals". Therefore, it is of vital importance to testify whether the features of TUs do exist in translated English from Chinese literary works.This study sets out to attain the verification or falsification of TUs hypotheses based on a self-compiled comparable corpus consisting of two sub-corpora:the NEC corpus and the CEC corpus. To be specific, the current study tests two of the TUs, namely simplification and explicitation, comparing the two corpora in measures of the standardized type/token ratio, lexical density, word length, mean sentence length, the use of complementizer that after reporting verbs, the use of in order, the contracted forms, conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects.The findings in the present study show that both simplification and explicitation hypotheses remain a doubt being TUs in translated English from Chinese literary works. Thus, it is also impossible to verify that simplification and explicitation are "universals" of translation.