A Comparative Study Of Collocational Patterns In Translated And Non-translated English

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of Corpus-based Translation Studies(CTS)which appeared in the beginning of the 1990s.It can be defined as the branch of the discipline that uses corpora of original and/or translated texts for empirical studies.The main content of CTS is to study translation as the features of social and cultural phenomena by using the corpus linguistics approach.Several translation scholars have claimed that translated language is different from non-translated language.Presently,CTS has primarily been concerned with describing translation as a product,by comparing corpora of translated and non-translated native texts in the target language,especially translated and native English.And translation universals(TUs)become a hot topic of translation studies.Translation universals,or universal features of translation,are primarily put forward by Mona Baker.They are defined by Baker as features that typically occur in translated texts and which are not interfered by specific linguistic systems.The best known features are explicitation,normalization,simplification and leveling out.The main theoretical basis of this study is simplification which is defined as a tendency to simplify the language and/or the information in translation by translators unconsciously.Over the past decade,TUs have been an important area of research as well as a target of debate in CTS.There is always a debate about the existence of TUs and the extent to which TUs exist.More empirical studies are needed to provide evidence to support either side of the debate.And this thesis is a corpus-based research of TUs(especially simplification)which may be likely to make a contribution to the debate,though only on a small scale.This study aims to find out whether "translation universals" exist in the translation of Chinese fiction into English by comparing the collocational patterns of nouns in translated and non-translated English of the same genre with corpus evidence.Two research questions are put forward:1)Does translated English exhibit a lower number of collocates for each node in comparison with non-translated English of the same genre?2)Does translated English show a stronger tendency to draw heavily on a small number of collocates(rather than the full range)in comparison with non-translated English of the same genre?The data analyzed in this thesis are drawn from a self-built monolingual comparable corpus of English which consists of two subcorpora:translated English subcorpus and non-translated English subcorpus.And from the data,the research draws a conclusion that translated English does not exhibit a lower number of collocates for each node and does not show a stronger tendency to draw heavily on a small number of collocates(rather than the full range)in comparison with non-translated English of the same genre.Therefore,collocational patterns do not tend to be less diverse in translated English in comparison with non-translated English of the same genre.In other words,simplification does not exist in the process of Chinese-English fiction translation.The findings are contrary to the translation universals hypothesis for that translation universals are not ubiquitous and they maybe only exist in the.translation process of certain languages.However,the factors such as original language,genre and translator must be taken into consideration in the study of translational languages.