| Modal verbs as an important word class in both Chinese and English, are mainly used to express modality and a large number of studies about them have been done both home and abroad. However, more efforts are devoted to the study of English modal verbs than to the study of Chinese modals and they are rarely studied from the perspective of Translation Studies. This thesis studies the translation of typical Chinese modal verb "neng" phrases including "neng", "bu neng" and "neng bu neng".The thesis firstly classifies them according to types of modality, then analyzes the translation products of "neng" phrases in the corpus developed by Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and finally studies the translations of "neng" phrases in the two English versions of a Chinese novel by an English-speaking translator and a Chinese-speaking translator respectively.The findings are as follows:firstly, all the "neng" phrases are translated into English modals, English non-modals, or left invisible. Secondly, the "neng" is most likely to be translated into English modals while the "bu neng" is the least, which indicates that the "neng" expresses the strongest subjectivity. Finally, the comparison of the two English versions of Lu Xun Xiao Shuo Ji finds that they are different in the frequency of use of English modals due to the translators' translation strategies. Yang tends to adopt literal translation, which indicates that Chinese people's way of thinking is characterized with the integration of subject and object. By contrast, Lovell tends to adopt liberal translation, which shows that the English way of thinking is featured with the subject-object dichotomy. In other words, the comparison shows that the translations differ maybe because the translators have different mother tongues.The thesis is instructive for Chinese-English translation, especially for the translation of Chinese modal verbs into English. It also serves as a testimony to the differences between Chinese and English thinking modes. |
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