A Corpus-based Study Of The Application Of Nominalization In The English Translated Texts Of Chinese Government’s Work Reports(2004-2013)

Since the 1990 s,corpus-based methodology has been widely engaged in translation studies and directly promoted the transformation towards descriptive translation studies.More and more experts and scholars have started to recognize descriptive translation study as a translation research paradigm and conduct corpus-based research.Nominalization is one of the most common and complicated features in human language,and also a phenomenon of grammaticalization.Different linguistic schools like transformative generative grammar,systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics proposed theories on the definition and classification of nominalization.For the past 30 years,many studies have concentrated on the category and textual function in its application by analysing English source texts like novels,news and legal documents.However few studies have focused on nominalization in the English translated texts.Therefore,this article conducts a corpus-based qualitative and quantitative study on the application of nominalized words in the English translation of Chinese government’s work reports from 2004 to 2013.By searching words ending with “-ment”,“-ion”,“-ity”,and “-ness” in the parallel corpus,this study collects nominalized transformations throughout the translated texts of ten years government work report and categorizes them into two groups.The study shows that nominalized transformations from verbs are used far more frequently than those from adjectives while nominalized transformations from adjectives are more diversified with a higher type/token ratio.This study also investigates the application of nominalization case by case and concludes that word-for-word translation and word conversion would explain how nominalized words come into being in translated texts.Word-for-word translation means nominalized words in translated texts are the result of directly corresponding with Chinese source texts.As for word conversion,further analysis reveals that those conversion cases are applied in the translation of Chinese serial verb constructions,translation of fixed Chinese verb-object phrases and explicitation of ideational metafunction information.This study concludes that the motivations of the use of nominalized words in the English translated texts of Chinese government’s work reports lie in four aspects such as translation requirement of political documents,the influence of source texts,the difference between Chinese and English languages and translator’s attention to readership.