A Redundancy Account Of Amplification In English-Chinese Translation

This thesis attempts a study of redundancy in English and Chinese to account for amplification, and studies the application of amplification to English-Chinese translation for the purpose of achieving equivalence of redundancy effect between source language text and target language text.In this paper, translation is considered as a kind of interlingual communication. Redundancy is the high result of predictability, which is structured into a message or text in order to facilitate accurate decoding or to strengthen social bonds or both. Redundancy in linguistics is taken as the contents that do not contain new information, but serve for the constructing, transmitting and understanding of language. Certain amount of redundancy is of great help to adjust the version's communication load so that it can pass through the intended receptor's channel with ease.The analysis of the collected examples shows that redundancy is embodied mainly in following four aspects in language, i.e. syntactic, semantic, rhetorical and cultural. The differences of word meaning, language structure and culture are the primary factors that influence redundancy balance between English and Chinese.Therefore, it is available to use redundancy to account for amplification. Amplification could be considered as a way to build in necessary redundancy into the translated text so as to make it consistent with the target language, so that the translated texts fit the receptive channel capacity of target language readers and achieve equivalence of redundancy with the source language text.According to the previous study of translation equivalence, the principle of "equivalence of redundancy effect" is introduced. This study looks into the use of amplification to achieve equivalence of redundancy effect in an English-Chinese translation context. To make syntactic amplification, two cases are quite often involved: filling out elliptical expressions and adding more explicit indication of relational. Semantic amplification is to make semantic elements carried implicitly in the source language explicit in the receptor language by adding certain redundancy to the translated text. Rhetorical amplification involves two cases—passive rhetoric and active rhetoric. The former is only to make the translated text clear and well-organized, while the latter is to seek for the similarities in mood, style, rhyme and rhythm. Bearing in mind that the cultural factors should be kept, we suggest using the methods of intratextual addition and extratextual annotation.