A Study On English-Chinese Dialect Translation Of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion

There are no unified methods and strategies in translating English dialect into Chinese.The thesis aims to,based on the English original versions of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and its two Chinese versions by Lin Yutang and Yang Xianyi,compare the similarities and differences of the Chinese translations of London cockney dialect spoken by a flower girl Liza and explore dialect translation strategies.Two English-Chinese parallel corpora LYTPARA and YXYPARA,which include the original text and its two Chinese translations,are built and aligned at sentence level by the author of the thesis,then software Wordsmith and ParaConc are employed.The author of the thesis endeavors,by integrating both quantitative and qualitative research methods,to provide a contrast of language varieties of Higgins and Liza,to carry out an exploration of linguistic features of cockney dialect and to make a comparison of their Chinese translations in the theoretical framework of functionalism.The following major findings have been achieved:First,compared with the language spoken by Liza,the language linguist Higgins uses is more varied and sophisticated,which directly reflects their different educational backgrounds and social identity.Second,the distinctive linguistic features of cockney dialect are lost and replaced by standard language in Chinese versions.The regional dialects spoken by the two translators can not be reflected in their translations.Third,both translators can correctly understand and translate the basic meaning of the dialogue.However,in comparison with Lin Yutan's formal lexis of the standard target language in translating Liza's cockney dialect,Yang Xianyi uses more colloquial words and phrases of the standard Chinese,which better accord with Liza's social identity and the original style of Pygmalion.