A Corpus-Based Study On Language Features Of English And Spanish Texts Translated From Chinese Political Documents

As China is gaining influence on the global stage,foreigners are looking forward to knowing more about this giant East Asian country.Foreign language versions of China’s political documents are one of their must-reads.Translation of these political documents,without doubt,plays a vital role.With that being said,the quality of the translated texts still cannot be guaranteed:it differs among language versions,because neither the translators nor the strategies adopted are the same.This will arouse different understanding of the documents among readers from different countries.Unfortunately,existing researches are limited to the study of translated texts of one single foreign language.And most of them use only traditional methods,instead of corpus-based ones that allow quantitative analysis of large-scale language materials.This thesis uses Sketch Engine to build a parallel corpus of the original text,the English version and the Spanish version of 2016 Report on the Work of the Government,to analyze language features of Chinese political documents and their translations.The study aims to find out the different strategies adopted and the quality of the translated texts,so as to shed light on future English or Spanish translation of Chinese political documents.The thesis includes five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction of the thesis’s background,objective,significance and method.Chapter 2 summarizes the theories of corpus-based translation studies,and previous studies.Chapter 3 describes the steps to build the parallel corpus used in this research.Chapter 4 is the main body of the thesis.It first analyzes average sentence length,sentence pair types,lexical density and word frequency of the English and the Spanish translated texts.Then it moves on to compare the universal and different features of the two texts,and explore the reasons behind.Chapter 5 is the conclusion part.All the analysis above shows that both the English and the Spanish translations present universal features of translated texts,such as explicitation,simplification and normalization,but the features in the English version are more conspicuous.This is because English translators tend to adopt various strategies to paraphrase the original text,while Spanish translators try to translate it word for word.Given the huge differences between Chinese,English and Spanish,and the features of Chinese political documents,translators should be more flexible by adopting strategies to make translation more accommodated to the style of the target language.This,of course,should not damage the meanings of the original text.Spanish translators could learn from English translators’strategies.