A Corpus-based Comparative Study On The Preposition Like In The Two Chinese Versions Of The Great Gatsby

Since the application of corpus in the field of translation studies has become popular,corpus-based translation studies have emerged one after another.There are studies on Chinese texts,on foreign texts,on English versions of Chinese original texts,on Chinese versions of English original works,and on other languages.In linguistics,there are many researches on metaphor,but there is relatively little research on corpus-based simile and metaphor,and most of them are metaphorical studies.This paper analyzes the translation of preposition “like” from the perspectives of metaphor and metaphor.A standard for translation behavior is supplied by Translation Norm Theory.In this thesis,the author focuses on the application of Toury's theory.The Great Gatsby is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's masterpiece who is one of the greatest American writers in the 20 th century,and its two Chinese translations—Yao Naiqiang's and Qiao Zhigao's versions are selected as the corpus' text by the author of this article.The author has built two small parallel bilingual corpus and made a contrastive study on the translation of sentences about the metaphorical structure of the preposition “like” in the original works.Corpus is used as quantitative statistics,combining Toury's translation norm theory and the cultural development of the two translators with qualitative analysis.The author used the corpus to search 119 sentences containing “like” in the original text,removing 40 verb usages of “like”,and finally leaving 79 sentences on the preposition usage of “like”.The author has listed the same and different translations in the two versions of the sentences what is used to be studied.The final comparative analysis shows that: when the original preposition “like” was translated,Yao Naiqiang and Qiao Zhigao had the same and different expression in their versions.Therefore,when dealing with the metaphor structure,the ontology and the metaphor also had the same and difference.In the same situation,sometimes both of them used simile to deal with “like”,sometimes they used metaphor to deal with it.When the translations are different,sometimes both of them used simile or metaphor to deal with “like”.Butsometimes Yao Naiqiang used simile to directly translate ontology and vehicle in the metaphor structure of preposition like.Qiao Zhigao used metaphor to deal with “like”,ontology was directly translated out,but the vehicle was not translated.In the process of translation,Yao Naiqiang mostly adopted literal translation,Qiao Zhigao adopted the method of free translation or combination of literal translation and free translation.The Translation Norms Theory of Toury held that if the translation is in favour of the original text,the translation tends to be sufficient;if the version is to the target language,the translation is inclined to acceptability.Through the author's comparative analysis,it was found that Yao Naiqiang's translation language tends to be sufficient in the source language,while Qiao Zhigao's translation is more inclined to the acceptability of translation.Due to the difference in cultural development,Yao Naiqiang's language is more concise and modern.The language of Qiao Zhigao is more tedious,and the use of classical characters and idioms is more than that of Yao Naiqiang.