Error Analysis Of Collocations In Translation Of Chinese Political Discourse By Student-translators

Political discourse aims to express national policy stance,establish country’s image and promote political ideas.Accurate and appropriate translation of political discourse is particularly important for the popularization of the political ideas.Yet there are many flaws in the translation texts of student-translators,especially the collocation errors.Recent years have witnessed fruitful researches about collocation.These researches concern more with lexical collocation,semantic prosody,cohesive devices and so on,but less with the collocation errors in political discourse translation.Based on translation texts from MTI second-year students,this study investigates the collocation errors and error causes in political discourse translation,and proposes some suggestions for political discourse translation and translation teaching.This study adopts Sinclair’s model of collocation and Carl James’ error analysis as framework and classifies political expressions into five types,including conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms,cultural loaded expressions and internationalisms based on the classification methods proposed by former scholars and the data collection of translation texts in this thesis.It analyzes the translation texts from student-translators,uses BNC,Sketch Engine,Oxford Dictionary,Oxford Collocations Dictionary,and the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English as references,explores the error types and causes at four levels,including lexical collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody with the methods the quantitative and qualitative analysis.This study finds that error types of lexical collocation are redundancy(18.03%),omission(9.84%),misordering(4.92%),misuse of synonyms(47.54%)and misuse of homology(19.67%),involving conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms,cultural loaded expressions and internationalisms.Colligation errors are misuse of content words(43.24%)and misuse of function words(56.76%,),relating to conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms,cultural loaded expressions.The error type of semantic preference is only misselection of synonyms,involving conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms and internationalisms.Semantic prosody errors are misselection of positive words(51.72%),misselection of neutral words(24.14%)and misselection of negative words(24.14%),relating to conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms and cultural loaded expressions.The causes of collocation errors include negative target language transfer,negative mother tongue transfer,lack of political background knowledge and reference aids misuse.Negative target language transfer causes most collocation errors in the translation of conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms,cultural loaded expressions and internationalisms,accounting for 82.42%,81.25%,100%,73.68% and71.43%,respectively.Negative mother tongue transfer causes errors in the translation of conventional Chinese political expressions,colloquialisms,neologisms and cultural loaded expressions,accounting for 14.29%,18.75%,26.32% and 28.57%,respectively.Lack of political background knowledge causes errors in the translation of conventional Chinese political expressions at semantic prosody level,accounting for 3.30%.This study reveals translation incompetence of student-translators from following aspects.They have difficulty in distinguishing subtle difference in meaning and usage of synonyms and homologies,have limited command of complex grammatic rules,have trouble in recognizing overlapping semantic meaning of the expression,employing translation strategies inflexibly by using literal translation excessively,focus less on semantic preference and semantic prosody,lack political background knowledge and do not familiarize with the corpus and collocation dictionaries.This study hopes to raise student-translators’ awareness of collocation and provide useful enlightenment for political discourse translation in the future.