A Corpus-driven Study On Translation Norms In The Scholars

Ru Lin Wai Shi(The Scholars),written by Wu Jingzi,a Chinese famous novelist in the Qing Dynasty,is a treasure of Chinese classical novels.Its characteristic of ?castigating the errors of the times out of unselfish motives? in the art of irony has a particular position in the history of Chinese literature.However,although the original has great research value,the existing studies on the English version of The Scholars,regardless of the quantity and quality,are difficult to match the status of this classic.Specifically,the first is absence of multidimensional perspectives in the study.The existing researches about the translated text mainly focus on a single perspective,such as the skopos theory,relevance theory,hermeneutics and multiculturalism,but a rare combination of a variety of perspectives and research methods.Second,the studies lack statistical and systematic empirical support.Third,the existing theory has not yet given sufficient attention to the difference and complexity of the translation norms.In view of this,the theoretical framework of the research is covered by communicative action proposed by Jurgen Habermas.With the help of self-built corpus,the translation norms of The Scholars are reconstructed through describing,analyzing and summarizing the translated language features of its English version by the Yangs.Besides,the forming reasons for such norms are also analyzed.With Hu Xiangyao‘s redefinition of translation norms and reclassification as methodology,the consistency between linguistic features and operation norm assumptions such as explicitness/implicitness,simplification/complication,parataxis/hypotaxis,normalization/ deviation and sanitization/ contamination are examined so as to reconstruct the translation norms.The novel Catch-22 which is similar in genre,token and time span of the original is used for a comparable corpus on the one hand,and random sampling of 42 chapters in The Scholars,of which part of speech,idioms and religious words have been marked,is will be used to establish a parallel corpus on the other hand.The data analysis by retrieving the corpus finds that,in terms of word usage of The Scholars,the English version shows a simplified trend compared with the source text;As the pronouns are more used in the translation,the frequency of nouns in the English version,especially the frequency of names is significantly lower than that in the source text,and the hypotaxis in The Scholars is showed in the increase of prepositions and conjunctions.In terms of syntactic structure,the average sentence length of the English version is shorter than the English sentences written by the educated.Apart from that,the tendency of syntactic hypotaxis in the translation version is more obvious than that in the source text,which is manifested in that the preposition frequency in the English translation is significantly increased on the whole and there is more frequent usage in explicitness than implicitness of the conjunctions.Therefore,the English version of Ru Lin Wai Shi showed the role played by both norms,and the normalization norm is major,with deviation subordinate.Besides,reviewing the cultural background against The Scholars,social cultural background,the translator and the poetics are three main factors influencing the shaping of this king of translation norms.The study on translation norms of The Scholars makes up for the deficiency of this research perspective.The results of the study contribute to an understanding of the social nature of the translation and explaining the value of the English version of The Scholars and its reasonable existence.What‘s more,the research method of translation norms is explored and its practical significance is realized.