A Corpus-based Study Of Nominalization And Its Translation In Business News In English

Nominalization is generally regarded as one of the most widely studied linguistic phenomena in written language. As a formal text, business news has some features of typical written discourse. Business news were selected for the reason that business news play an increasingly important role in the development of economy as well as people’s daily life. This thesis adopted grammatical metaphor in the systemic functional grammar as the theoretical framework for its profound and in-depth exploration in nominalization.Studies on nominalization have made major achievements in the recent years. However, after summarizing the prior studies, the author found that much attention has been paid to nominalization in English scientific, academic, legal, contractual discourse as well as business letters, but little to the business news in English, especially the translation of nominalization. Hence, there is still room for further exploration in this field.Eighty business news in English and their corresponding translated versions were collected from April, 2015 to October, 2015 as the objects of the present study, forty English texts from China Daily, twenty English texts from the New York Times and the Economist respectively, and forty corresponding translated versions from China Daily and twenty corresponding translated texts from The Economist and The New York Times separately. As for the research instruments, the data were processed by C7 tagset of CLAWS4 for tagging the English texts, My Txt Seg Tag for tagging the translated Chinese versions, SCAT₁.30（Snowman Computer Assisted Translation Software） for aligning the target texts and the translated ones, and Chi-Square Calculator for calculating the P value to reflect whether there is significant difference between the corpora. The author made comparisons from two aspects. On the one hand, comparing the business news in English from China Daily as Chinese Writer Corpus（CWC）, the Economist and the New York Times as Native Writer Corpus（NWC）, the author aimed at finding the differences in the use of nominalization between Chinese writers and native writers. On the other hand, comparing the translated texts from China Daily as Chinese Translated News Corpus（CTNC）, the Economist and the New York Times as Native Translated News Corpus（NTNC）, the author aimed at exploring the differences in the process of translation of nominalization. Based upon the above comparisons, the specific techniques of translation of nominalization were discussed for giving some suggestions for the translators.According to the statistics, the thesis finds that 1) statistical difference is found in the general use of nominalization on the lexical level between CWC and NWC. Statistical difference is found in the general use of nominalization on clausal level between CWC and NWC. In addition, statistical difference can be found in the use of process nominalization, while significant differences can not be found in the rest. 2) As for how nominalized words are translated on the lexical level, there exist statistical differences in the nominalization translated into verbs and extension of meaning, however, the significant differences can not be found in the rest. As for the clausal level, there are no statistical differences in the nominalization translated into adverbial clause. 3) In terms of the translation strategies of nominalization, translation into different parts of speech, with extension of meaning, variation in number of words, and into clauses are the better choices for translators.