An Empirical Study On Translation Units In The Translation Process

Since the 1980s’,Chinese scholars in translation studies have begun to pay attention to the research on translation unit.Since there is much limitation in the research on translation unit based on text from the theoretical perspective,more and more scholars turn to the empirical study on translation unit in the translation process.This thesis employs think-aloud protocols to study the translation unit used by the translators in the translation process to shed a light for exploring the internal translation process of translators.This thesis,with 15 postgraduates majoring in English as subjects,studies the internal thinking process of translation between English and Chinese by the subjects via think-aloud method,aiming to learn and describe the use and the distribution of translation units employed by the subjects through transcription and encoding of the think-aloud protocols(TAPs)data,explore the relationship between translation unit and translation quality and discuss factors affecting the use of translation unit based on TAPs report.This study demonstrates:1)in the translation between English and Chinese,sentence is the basic unit of analysis and clause is the main synthesis unit chosen by the subjects.However,other levels of translation unit including word and phrase cannot be ignored,since they account for a considerable proportion in translation units used by the subjects.2)The analysis units are concentrated in two adjacent levels of unit,namely,clause and sentence,which indicates the translator’s tendency to look for a "standard unit of analysis";while the synthesis units are distributed over four levels(word,phrase,clause and sentence),which shows that the choice of the translation units by the subjects in actual translation process is related to the emergence of the specific translation problems.3)The percentage of translation unit at all levels is different in the translation between English and Chinese,which shows that the use and distribution of translation unit are different in the translation.4)This study finds that the length of translation unit in the translation process influences the quality of translated text,and the translator should choose the proper translation unit according to context and principle of equivalence.At the same time,it can be concluded that lexical problems,translation mode,short-term memory and other factors influence the choice of translation unit.The research results show that the empirical study on translation unit in translation process based on think-aloud method is conductive to disclosing the internal thinking process of translators and contributes to translation teaching and training.