A Translation Study Of Chinese And English Causal Connectives

Both Chinese and English causal connectives exert great impacts on the expression of logical thinking.Therefore,in recent years,an increasing number of researches on Chinese and English causal connectives have been published.These researches mainly focus on the classification and category of causal connectives,case study of causal connectives,discourse coherence of causal connectives,the usage of causal connectives in teaching,and the comparison of Chinese and English causal connectives.However,the research about comparison and translation of causal connectives in essays is rare.In the thesis,the author selects Zhang Peiji’s Selected Chinese Modern Essays as the research object.Based on these books,through the comparison of corpus,the author shall quantitatively and qualitatively analyze translation of Chinese-to-English causal connectives from the perspectives of overall distribution,phonology,structure,grammar and semantics,and discuss translation strategies used in essays.It naturally comes to the conclusion that: firstly,the overall using frequency of English causal connectives is higher than that of Chinese causal connectives.So,when translating Chinese to English causal connectives,translators should use more English causal connectives to directly present the causal relationship in source text.Secondly,from the perspective of phonology,Chinese uses bisyllable causal connectives,while English often uses monosyllable and bisyllable causal connectives.Thus,when translating Chinese to English causal connectives,translators should use more monosyllable and bisyllable English causal connectives.Thirdly,from the perspective of structure,Chinese causal connectives are often used alone,while English causal connectives can only be used alone.Therefore,when translating Chinese to English causal connectives,translators should pay attention to the structure of Chinese and English causal connectives.Fourthly,from the perspective of grammar,Chinese word class,which is used to describe the causal relationship,is not fixed.For instance,“yin(因)” can be a conjunction or a preposition when it’s used to describe the causal relationship.While,English word class is relatively fixed.For instance,When “as” is used to describe thecausal relationship,it can only be a conjunction.Fifthly,from the perspective of semantics,Chinese often uses effect connectives and the outcomes of events are emphasized here,while English often uses cause connectives and the reasons of events are emphasized here.That’s to say,when expressing same causal relationship,translators should uses more English cause connectives.At last,in order to make the translation more natural and native,translators often use amplification,omission,conversion,inversion and division to translate Chinese to English causal connectives.As for the using frequency of these translation methods,amplification ranks first.