Research On The Chinese-to-English Translation Of Anomalous Collocations

Anomalously-collocated common language,i.e.anomalous collocation,is one of the creative devices in literary works,an embodiment of literariness,which helps improve the rhetorical effect,artistic appeal,and the writer's style.The translation of anomalous collocations is one of the most important issues in the research field for literary translation.Since Chinese and English have greatly different collocating modes,the translation of anomalous collocations from Chinese to English tends to encounter some difficulties,such as the translator's background,cultural conflicts,social environment,and so on.Anomalous collocations are the writer's conscious result of creativity,which contains certain rhetorical functions and linguistic meanings.The type of the source text,the reader of the target text,the differences between the two languages,the goal of the translation,and many other factors can affect the extent that the translation reproduces the effect of the anomaly.The language in The Promise Bird by Zhang Yueran is novel and unique with numerous anomalous collocations,therefore the book and its English version can be suitable for this research.This thesis explores appropriate translation strategies for anomalous collocations from Chinese to English through the analysis of the examples in The Promise Bird,in the hope of laying a foundation for future translation practice and studies and bring Chinese modern literature to the Western world.This thesis consists of five parts.The first is Introduction,presenting the research significance,the research methodology,and the structure of the article.The second is Literature Review,giving the working definition of anomalous collocation and reviewing the studies on this field and on the translation of anomalous collocations at home and abroad.The third discusses the examples in The Promise Bird from the rhetorical perspective,which is divided into transferred epithet,simile,metaphor,synesthesia,personification,zeugma,enallage,and then explores the translation strategies for different situations based on the above analysis.The fourth discusses the examples in The Promise Bird from the linguistic perspective,including the subject-predicate structure,the verb-object structure,the premodifier-headword structure,and then summarizes the translation strategies for different situations according to the above analysis.The last is the conclusion,with major findings,limitations and suggestions for future studies.Based on the literature at home and abroad and the examples in The Promise Bird from two perspectives,the thesis makes a generalization about the translation of anomalous collocations from Chinese to English: basically,the form of anomaly can be alerted or rearranged,but the nature of it should be maintained,so that the aesthetic effect in the source and target texts is equal.Therefore,whether the collocation is rhetorically or linguistically anomalous,a literal translation is the first consideration,provided that the message is accurate and there is no ambiguity against the target language and culture.