A Corpus-based Study On The Translation Of Collocations Of Kungfu Verbs In Jin Yong’s Novels

Recently,the English translations of Jin Yong’s novels have attracted extensive attention from the academic community.The existing studies on the English translation of Jin Yong’s novels mainly concentrate on the translation strategies and the translation of martial arts nouns.However,few scholars pay attention to the translation of the collocations of Kungfu verbs.In Jin Yong’s novels,there are large numbers of fighting scenes.Therefore,the translation of the collocations of Kungfu verbs is worthy of careful investigation.This thesis selects Shediao Yingxiong Zhuan,Luding Ji,and their published English translations Legends of the Condor Heroes and The Deer and the Cauldron to form a parallel corpus,then extracts the concordance lines of high-frequency Kungfu verbs from the corpus with manual proofreading.After that,this thesis uses Kungfu verbs as search items to retrieve and extract their significant collocations,then annotates the translation methods manually.Finally,based on the quantitative statistics of the translation methods,this thesis attempts to explain why translators adopt the corresponding methods.This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the featured collocations of Kungfu verbs in Jin Yong’s novels?(2)What translation methods do the translators apply in translating the collocations of Kungfu verbs?(3)What are the possible reasons that lead to the choices of specific translation methods?The major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)With the help of Antconc,this thesis searches the significant collocates of Kungfu verbs,finding that the verb collocates are of the highest frequency.The collocation of “VN+Vk” has 183 concordance lines,and the collocation of “Vk+Result” has 284 concordance lines.(2)In the translation of “VN+Vk” collocation,most cases adopt the translation method of condensation,which means that only one verb in the collocation is conveyed in the translation,and the translators tend to omit the translation of V in VN and retain the translation of Vk.In the translation of “Vk+Result” collocation,most cases adopt the translation method of condensation,and the translators tend to omit the translation of Vk while retaining the result in the translation.(3)Through analysis,the possible reasons for the condensation may lie in the pragmatic differences between the Chinese and English languages.Chinese is a process-oriented language that tends to use successive verbs to enhance process details,while English is a result-oriented language that tends to compress process details and emphasize the event results.This study helps deepen readers’ understanding of Kungfu verbs’ collocations in Jin Yong’s martial arts novels and provides some reference for their English translations in the future.