A Comparative Study On Translating Chinese Four-character Phrases

Four-character phrases, as a kind of vocabulary unit, play a very important role in both ancient and modern Chinese.Four-character phrases are composed of four Chinese characters. They usually fall into categories of free phrases and set phrases. Free four-character phrases are composed of four free Chinese characters. The four characters are assembled temporarily and can be broken up to form a new phrase. Set phrases are frozen patterns of language and allow little or no variation in form. Their meanings can not be deduced from their individual components. At the moment, researches on translation of Chinese idioms and adoption of four-character idioms in English-Chinese translation have been made to a large extent. However, researches on how to translate free four-character phrases, especially classic Chinese phrases, into English are relatively scare. Therefore, the author considers it is necessary to cast focus on this point.The data resources are 175 four-character phrases in the first 100 chapters of Caigen Tan of two English versions---The Roots of Wisdom translated by Zhou Wenbiao (2008) and Tending the Root of Wisdom by Paul White.This thesis gives a general introduction to classification and characteristics of claasic Chinese four-character phrases in Caigen Tan and make a discussion on previous study of translation of four-character phrases. At home, scholars cast the majority of their energy on translation of idioms, or traditional Chinese medicine phrases; whereas, scholars abroad only conduct translation of traditional Chinese classics without paying special attention to translating classic Chinese four-character phrases. Therefore, it is necessary and significant to make a research in this field. With the assistance of theory of Roman Jacobson's three categories of translation & Eugene A. Nida's functional equivalence, a comparative study of the two English versions are made from aspects of meaning and style. Besides, approach of corpus analyasis is also adopted. After analysis and evaluation of the two English versions are done on various level, we comes to the conclusion that translating classic four-character phrases should follow two steps. One is intralingual translation, namely precisely understand the original meaning; and the other is interlingual translation, namely accurately express the original meaning. Because form of Chinese four-character phrases is unique and there's no corresponding parts in English language, it's necessary to make some adjustments during translation process so as to get a dynamic equivalent to the original text on level of meaning and style. By utilizing Wordsmith Tools, statistical analysis is also made on lexical level.After comparing the similarities and discrepancies of translation strategies, the author considers that the source-language translator has more advantages on precise understanding than the target-language translator; whereas, the latter has more advantages on accurate expressing than the former under the prerequisite that he has an adequate and accurate understanding of the original text. Therefore, it seems that source language translator has more advantages on translating classical Chinese four-character phrases on the whole.