A Corpus-Based Study Of Translation Universals In Presidents' Welcome Messages On The English Websites Of Chinese Universities

By now,most studies on translation universals have been focused on literary translations,but few studies have to do with exploring the recurrent features in university publicity translation.Therefore,the present study tries to look into whether three translation universals,namely explicitation,simplification and normalization exist in presidents'welcome messages on the English websites of Chinese universities by using corpus linguistic approach.To testify these hypotheses from multiple levels,the author totally collects 200 texts of president welcome message,within which 100 are from the English websites of Chinese universities,and the rest are took from the official websites of American universities,and builds a comparable corpus containing two sub-corpora.One is the English translational texts(ETT for short)and the other is English source texts(EST for short).To investigate the hypothesis of expliciation,the author compares the frequencies of contracted forms,conjunctions,optional subordinating conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects in ETT and EST.The results show that compared with EST,the occurrence frequencies of contracted forms,conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects are lower in ETT,and ETT is more inclined to leave out the optional subordinating conjunctions.Except for the use of contracted forms,the above indicators manifest translated texts are not explicated.On exploration to the simplification,the author discusses the standard type/token ratio,lexical density,lexical difficulty,and mean word length at lexis level and analyzes mean sentence length and readability at sentence level.The results show that though the translational texts are not lexically simplified,they are more readable and syntactic simplification does exist in ETT.When investigating normalization hypothesis,the author explores the use of hapax legomena,high-frequency words and coinages in terms of lexical level,and investigates the use of "with +absolute construction" and passive voice at syntactic level.The results demonstrate that translational texts are normalized at both lexical and syntactic level.The empirical investigations reveal that the normalization feature exists in the ETT,while the results could not definitely apply to the hypotheses of explicitation and simplification.However,due to the fact that the size of the self-built corpus used in this study is small,the results to some extent might not reveal the whole truth.It suggests that more measures and larger corpus for studies of translation universals in university presidents' welcome messages are needed.