A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Translation Universals Of Three English Versions Of The Art Of War

Chinese culture is going out continuously.In the process,Chinese ancient classics are facing increasing opportunities to be disseminated to the whole world.The Art of War,published during Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period,has been crowned as “The Holy Bible of military science”.Ever since the publishment of the first English version of The Art of War,studies on this military classic have been implemented in multiple fields,generating “Sunzi Mania” globally.In recent years,there have been various studies on the English translation of The Art of War,most of which center on comparison of translation strategies and communicating effects between versions,seldom involving translation universals.The thesis focuses on explicitation,simplification and normalization in three versions of The Art of War.Among numerous versions of The Art of War,the author selects three most authoritative versions translated by Lionel Giles,Samuel B.Griffith and Lin Wusun as translated texts in the study.Meanwhile,the main body of Sunzi with Annotations of Ten Masters is chosen as the parallel source text.The thesis attempts to discover the existence and features of explicitation,simplification and normalization by comparing three versions based on the self-built parallel corpus of The Art of War and the monolingual comparable corpus.Data are collected and analyzed according to the translation of conjunctions,personal pronoun subjects and optional that to reveal features of explicitation in the three versions.Features of simplification are demonstrated by parameters including type/token ratio(TTR),standard TTR(STTR),lexical density,lexical difficulty,mean sentence length and mean word length.Nominalized words and passive voice are observed to reveal features of normalization.Results show that,Lin Wusun's version shows the strongest tendency of explicitation in terms of the translation of conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects,but optional that fails to prove the existence of explicitation in the three versions.The features of simplification and normalization vary according to different parameters.In general,Giles' version indicates the strongest tendency of simplification and normalization.The thesis conducts detailed research on features of explicitation,simplification and normalization in the three versions and analyze factors affecting them,which is practically significant to the translation study of The Art of War.