A Corpus-Based Study Of The Representation Of China's Image In The Translation Of The Three-body Problem

China's image is a combination of our own awareness and the international community's perception of China,which determines its reputation in the world.As a rising power,China is devoted to shaping a positive national image and promoting cultural output on the international stage.This is also the requirement for improving China's cultural soft power and enhancing its reputation abroad.Translation,as the important carrier of information for communication,plays an indispensable role of the media to disseminate Chinese voice.Chinese-English translation involves not only the“self-constructing”national image by domestic writers or institutions,but also the“other-constructing”national image by foreign translators and overseas institutions.Therefore,this thesis conducts a corpus-based translation study on the renowned science fiction,The Three-Body Problem,to compare the representations of China's image in the parallel corpus and to explain the representation of national image,expecting to offer insight for the construction of China's image in future translation practice.In an approach which combines quantitative and qualitative analyses,this research analyzes the linguistic features of the translation with the reference corpora,BNC and TEC.Then it attains the Keyword list with the reference corpus,BROWN Corpus.The representative Keywords are classified into political words,economic words and cultural words,which are retrieved and analyzed in the parallel corpus.With the help of concordance function and collocate function in AntConc,this study makes analyses of China's political image,economic image and cultural image in the translation respectively.The study finds that China's political image during the Cultural Revolution is generally represented as neutral.Nevertheless,there are more negative descriptions about chaotic social environment and the persecution of intellectuals than positive descriptions.The political image after the New Period of Socialist Modernization is positive as a responsible world power full of development potential.The economic image of China also changes over time.The economic image of China in the 20~thh century can be concluded as being poor and backward,while the image in the 21~stt century is presented as favorable with rapid economic development and improvement of people's living standards.As the translator preserves as much of the original's nuances of meaning as possible,the cultural image of China is represented as an old yet vigorous civilization with a long history and traditional values.Last but not least,the thesis reveals the determinants in the representations of China's image from the perspectives of the original author,the translator and the target readers respectively.The original author constructs the national image in a changeable way for it is the portrayal of reality and it makes the whole storyline plausible.In the process of translating,the translator's cultural competence,translation style and translation purpose determine the representation of China's image.In addition,the target readers'expectation and reception ability also influence the representation of China's image.