An Investigation Into Textual Economy Levels Of Chinese Translated Fictions

There is a wide gap between theory and practice of translation for a long time, so the translation studies needs an effective interface between theory and practice of translation, that is, translation criticism. Translation criticism is traditionally ST-oriented, but it does little help to evaluate the translation, so Zhang Wenyu sees from TT- oriented perspective and bases on this, he puts forward a quantitative descriptive model for the economy level of a Chinese translated text----the Word Set Model. It includes a hypothesis(Negative Relevance Hypothesis), two word sets(Set of Redundancy Indicators, SORI and Set of Noisy Expressions, SONE), two computer programs(WCOUNT, and ELE--Economy Level Evaluator), an equation, and one standard corpora(the Standard Corpus of Chinese Fiction). The model is based on the framework for textual economy, it contains two parts: basic economy and aesthetic economy. The former aims at ‘minimum redundancy’ and deals with four types of redundancy--semantic redundancy, cohesive redundancy, structural redundancy and phonological redundancy, and the latter, aims at ‘maximum tension’ and it realized at four levels--morphological level, sentence level, figurative level and textual level.The main purpose of the study is to test the validity of the Word Set Model through analyzing the two versions of translated fiction Hawthorn ’ s the Scarlet Letter. First, use the Word Set Model to calculate the economy level of each chapter of two translated versions of the Scarlet Letter, second, analyze each chapter of two translated versions of the Scarlet Letter by manual analysis, then get the redundancy ration of each chapter, finally compare the results get from the Word Set Model and manual analysis according to the negative relevance hypothesis(the higher the economy level of a text is, the lower the redundancy ratio of a text is). Except chapter 7, all the rest of chapters meet the hypothesis, the reason why this happen maybe because it is affected by the subjectivity. Overall the results meet the hypothesis; thus the validity of the Word Set Model gets proved, the exception also indicates the limitations of the Word Set Model, it needs to be improved.