A Corpus-Based Investigation Of The Linguistic Features Of Zhang Peiji’s English Translations Of Chinese Prose

As is well-known, Zhang Peiji is one of the most famous translators in China. He has profound attainments in literary translation, especially in the Chinese modern prose translation. His books of Selected Modern Chinese Essays have received much appreciation by many scholars in China. Then, what’s the features of Zhang Peiji’s English translations of Chinese prose? What is the difference and contact between Zhang’s translations and original English prose on the language? This thesis, as a case study of Zhang Peiji’s translations, explores the linguistic features of translations of Chinese prose based on corpus. To be specific, the concept of translational language is firstly introduced and the corpus-based translation studies of translational language have been summarized. Secondly, the author, based on self-built model of comparable and parallel corpus, collects the data needed and does statistical analysis. Finally, this thesis, based on the analysis of lexical and syntactic features of English translations, explores the linguistic features of English translations of Chinese prose.This thesis, based on corpus, has analyzed the language of English translation of Chinese prose and made the following conclusions: firstly, the translated English prose applies simpler words and sentences than the original English prose and presents the tendency of simplification at the lexical and syntactic level. Secondly, due to the influence of the source language, the translated English prose prefers to use the first personal pronouns compared with the original English essays. Besides, the translated English prose accounts for a lower percentage of the function word “that” than the original English prose. Lastly, for “the Ba-construction” and “the Bei-construction”, Zhang Peiji adopts different translation methods according to different situations in order to make it more idiomatic. The main conclusion of the thesis is that, compared with the original English prose, Zhang Peiji’s English translation is simplified in the vocabulary and sentence. But given the corpus is limited, the conclusion is unavoidably incomprehensive, which remains to be supplemented by the future research.