The Simplification Of Delexical Verbs In English-Chinese Translated Movie Scripts

Delexical verbs,otherwise known as light verbs,dummy verbs or formal verbs,are a common inner/cross-lingual phenomenon.What distinguishes them from regular verbs is their relatively light semantic meaning,which means those verbs themselves do not carry much semantic meaning on their own but rely heavily on the collocations they keep.For example,in English,“to take a look”basically means“to look”and“to have a walk”basically means“to walk”,and in Chinese,jinxing yanjiu(????)basically means yanjiu(??),and zuo diaocha(???)basically means diaocha(??).This paper,based on a one-million-word parallel corpus,sets out to investigate the distribution of Chinese delexical verbs in translated movie scripts and finds that in the process of movie translation,there is a significant trend to simplify delexical verbs.And this simplification is manifested in two ways,namely,a significant higher occurrence of relatively easier delexical verb construction zuo(?or?)and a significant lower occurrence of other delexical verbs like jinxing(??)and jiayi(??).Moreover,this trend of simplification is not only obvious when compared to original Chinese writings(LCMC)but also present when compared with translated written Chinese(ZCTC);whereas the comparison between LCMC and ZCTC shows that there is no uniformed trend in terms of the distribution of delexical verbs,which brings this thesis to conclude that the simplification of Chinese delexical verbs is a feature pertaining to movie translation.Furthermore,this study tries to account for the simplification of delexical verbs from three perspectives,including a)the intrinsic feature of movie translation,b)Source Language shining-through and c)the cognitive features of delexical verbs,among which the intrinsic feature of movie translation exerts physical constraints on the number of words used in movie translation and hence calls upon the translator to shorten his/her sentences,while Source Language shining-through results in the overuse of zuo construction for the very fact that there is a significant higher occurrence of do and its variants in the source text,and last but not the least,the cognitive features of other Chinese delexical verbs like jinxing and jiayiv exhibit a relatively more complicated manner which is assumed to discourage the translator to adapt such construction.Therefore,it is proposed in this study that it is the combined effect of the above three factors that result in the general simplification of Chinese delexical verbs in English-Chinese movie script translation.