A Corpus-based Research On Simplification Of Lexical Patterns Of C-E Interpreting Of Chinese University Students

Since the 1990 s,corpus-based translation studies have developed rapidly because of the development and maturing of corpus techniques and corpus linguistics.Among all the research fields of corpus-based translation studies,the studies on translation universals are attracting more and more scholars? attention.Based on the literature review,the three translation universals hypotheses which have been discussed the most by the researchers are simplification,explicitation and normalization.Most researches focus on explicitation.Few of the researches pay attention to simplification and normalization.Most researches on simplification are based on translation corpus.Few researches on simplification are based on interpreting corpus.No research on simplification is based on interpreting corpus of EFL learners.In this case,EFL learners corpus is adopted in the thesis to study simplification of lexical patterns in interpreting texts so as to fulfill the blank on the verification of simplification and make the learners understand more about simplification of lexical patterns.Corpus-based research method is used in the thesis in order to discuss whether or not can the simplification of lexical patterns be verified in the Chinese university students? interpreting corpus and by analyzing the performance features of simplification,some interpreting tips might be proposed in the end.Two corpora are used in the research.One is PACCEL-S of Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners.The other is a self-built Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English.The former is the observation corpus with tokens totaling 145,882.The latter is the reference corpus with tokens totaling 158,992.The analysis tools used in the research are Treetagger,WordSmith Tools 6.0,BFSU PowerConc 1.0 and RangeBNC in order to study the performance of simplification on lexical level in interpreting texts.Seven analysis indicators used in the research are TTR and STTR,lexical density,mean word length,mean sentence length,lexical difficulty analysis,list heads and norminalization.The research findings of indicators of TTR and STTR,lexical density and mean sentence length support the simplification hypothesis,while those of indicators of the rest four oppose the simplification hypothesis.The research findings partly support but partly oppose the simplification hypothesis.At last,the thesis puts forward some simplification strategies and gives the suggestion that the students under study should decide whether to use simplification tips or not depending on the interpreting occasions.