A Corpus-Based Study Of The Chinese Translations Of Discourse Marker Well In Shakespeare's Plays

The idea of investigating translation and interpreting through corpora was first put forward by Mona Baker (1993). At the time it was envisaged that corpus linguistics would provide the methodology for carrying out empirical investigations while translation theory would identify the areas of enquiry and elaborate operational hypotheses. Just as Mona Baker (2000:246) once pointed out that to decide certain translation choice of a translator is a kind of pattern rather than a single instance, and should be only through the observation of a large number of translation materials that are persuasive. Ever since Baker's advocacy of using corpus to conduct translation studies, this specific area has boasted a promising prospect.With the development of Corpus Translation Studies (CTS) and its remarkable advantage in terms of its descriptive nature and objectivity in quantitative research, the achievements by far have been notably fruitful. With the assistance of corpus—English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare's Plays (ECPCSP), the present paper focuses on the translations of the 23 plays of William Shakespeare, by two translators, Liang Shiqiu, and Zhu Shenghao respectively, in particular, their translations of the English discourse marker (DM) well in these plays, from the perspective of functional equivalence.On the basis of statistical analysis and illustration of certain representative instances extracted from the corpus, this thesis provides a largely quantitative study of the two Chinese translations in terms of DM well's different functions in the source text (ST) and the effects via well's"equivalent"Chinese expressions in the target text (TT). By comparing the two Chinese translations of well, the present paper elaborates their translation strategies in general and explores the driving forces for their distinct translator styles in translating well. From this a general conclusion is drawn as follows: generally, they share salient similarities in achieving the holistic equivalence between the ST and the TT; but specifically, there are significant differences between the two in translating well that performs certain interpersonal functions, like when used as an emotion indicator or face-threat mitigator. In the very end, this thesis also shares its own outlook on the near future of corpus translation studies, a promising blueprint in view.