A Corpus-based Study Of Translation Universals In The English Versions Of Classic Chinese Dramas

As a significant part of the traditional Chinese culture, the classic Chinese dramas are also an important literary genre in ancient China. As a representative of the classic Chinese dramas, Chang Sheng Dian, full of poetic artistic conceptions, and enjoying its lucid and attractive diction, has thrived on the stage all the time since its beginning. Along with the further development of the cultural communication between China and the western countries, Chang Sheng Dian has for many times been translated into other languages.Meanwhile, its translation versions also become the significant object of academic discussions and researches. These discussions and researches, however, have never gone beyond the scopes of translator's style, translator's subjectivity, translation strategies,cultural transformation, etc. And qualitative methods have been employed in most of these researches. There are no empirical studies on Chang Sheng Dian Till now,this research is the first one which conducts translation universals study on the English versions of Chang Sheng Dian and which conducts translation universals study on the English versions of classic Chinese dramas as a whole. And the corpus as a research tool is also used for the first time in the study of Chang Sheng Dian to get statistic support.In 1993, Mona Baker clarified translation universals and defined them as "features which typically occur in translated text rather than original utterances and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic systems". In Baker's view. scholars at home and abroad conducted various researches, verifying and enriching translation universals. At the same time, some scholars' researches also falsified translation universals. So far, the question is still up in the air as to whether the hypotheses of translation universals, as in Baker's illustration, are independent from language pairs.At present, the researches about translation universals at abroad mainly concentrate on the verification and expressions of translation universals between source texts and translated texts in languages from Indo-European family. Domestically the verification and expressions of translation universals in translated Chinese texts from original English texts are popular and researches at home seldom come down to the verification and expressions of translation universals in translated English texts from original Chinese texts. Meanwhile,these researches did not involve the translated English version of classic Chinese dramas. In view of this, this thesis attempts for the first time to find out whether the hypotheses of translated universals will be verified in translated English version of classic Chinese dramas.This thesis, based on the self-built comparable corpus, will verify or falsify the translation universals hypotheses. Specifically, the current study will just test one of the translation universals hypotheses, namely simplification. In this thesis, the author will prudentially investigate and make a comparative analysis of measures like the Standard Type/Token Ratio, lexical density, mean word length, the ratio of long words, the rate of high-frequency words,and mean sentence length in both of the two sub-corpuses to verify whether the simplification hypothesis exist in the English version of classic Chinese dramas.The tools used in this study are WordSmith 3.0, Altroedit32 and CLAWS7.The results of the study show that the STTR of the CSDC is higher than that of the EDC, the lexical density of the CSDC is higher than that of the EDC and the mean word length of the CSDC is longer than that of the EDC, while the mean sentence length of the CSDC is longer than that of the EDC. All of these discrepancies are significantly obvious.Thus,from these aspects,it is safe to say that simplification hypothesis on lexical level does not exist in the CSDC.