An Investigation On Textual Economy Levels Of Chinese Translated Essays

With the development of Translation Studies, an obvious gap occurs between translation theory and translation practice, thus translation research needs a new breakthrough. In the past, people didn’t pay enough attention to the expressive level of target language in translations. So the integrity of translations as independent target language versions is ignored. Zhang Wenyu makes explorations on this and establishes a framework for describing the expressive level of Chinese translated texts. He puts the focus on establishing a quantitative descriptive model for evaluating the economy levels of Chinese translated texts, that is, the Word Set Model. This Model applies the corpus technology in translation quality assessment. On the basis of the two Word Sets(Set of Redundancy Indicators and Set of Noisy Expressions), it can figure out the economy level of a text quickly through computer programs. He combines the Economy Principle of Language with other related achievements of Rhetorics and Stylistics and proposes the Textual Economy framework which contains two parts: Aesthetic Economy and Basic Economy, and the Basic Economy deals with four types of redundancy-- semantic redundancy, cohesive redundancy, structural redundancy and phonological redundancy.Basic Economy is the basis of the present study. Under the Textual Economy framework, the following three aspects are studied. First, Figure out the redundancy ratio and the economy level of each essay in the two translated versions through the Word Set Model. Here, the economy level of a text refers to its concise level. It is transformed by the redundancy ratio, and negatively related to the text’s redundancy ratio. Second, under the Textual Economy framework, Manual Analysis is carried out about each essay in the two translated versions, and the whole real redundancy ratio of a text is obtained. Third, testify the validity of the Word Set Model through using the results from Manual Analysis to test the results from the Word Set Model. Because the Word Set Model can only detect the structural redundancy and the cohesive redundancy. Whether the two kinds of redundancy can nicely reflect the whole real redundancy of a text, it needs testing by the results of Manual Analysis.In comparisons and analyses, the order of the texts in tables has been arranged according to their marks(economy levels). Through comparisons, the two redundancy ratios of most essays in each translated version have the similar changing trend. This preliminarily shows that the redundancy ratio of a text from the Word Set Model can nicely reflect the whole real redundancy ratio of a text. Especially, through monadic linear regression analysis of the two kinds of redundancy ratios, there is a significant linear regression correlation between them. This testifies the feasibility of the Word Set Model in a more obvious and objective way.The Word Set Model is a new type of model.It needs to be enriched by and by.In Manual Analysis,there are several words which contain the redundancy elements in the Set of Redundancy Indicators,but they are not included in the Set of Noisy Expressions.These words are fixed expressions in Chinese,and they should be excluded from redundancy frequency.These Words are the followings:“所有”、“得以”、“求得”、“变为”、“巴不得”.