A Corpus-based Study Of The Chinese Translations Of The Discourse Marker Why In Shakespeare’s Plays

As the gem-like masterpieces in world literature, Shakespeare‘s plays havealways attracted literature lovers and scholars to conduct various researches. Since theintroduction of Shakespeare‘s plays to China, many outstanding scholars and writersdevoted themselves into translating Shakespeare‘s works. Along with the translatingof Shakespeare‘s works goes the study of various Chinese translations of his works.However, the author found through literature review that most translation studies ofShakespearean plays since the second half of the20thcentury were either linguisticresearches on specific lexical, semantic or syntactic units or comparisons of differentChinese versions. In addition, studies on discourse markers (DM) at home and abroadmostly focus on DMs‘pragmatic functions or the realization of such functions incommunicative events. The study of Chinese translations of DMs barely started inrecent years.With the boom of pragmatics and corpus translation studies, it is of greatimportance to probe into the Chinese translations of DMs through a corpus approachfrom the pragmatic perspective. Considering DMs commonly occur in oralconversations and dialogues as well as monologues can be found everywhere in plays,this paper centers on the translations of the DM why in Shakespeare‘s plays.Assisted by the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare‘s Plays(ECPCSP), the paper conducts a quantitative and qualitative study of the Chinesetranslations of the DM why in the three Chinese versions respectively by Liang Shiqiu,Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping. The paper aims to investigate the three translators‘similarities and differences in dealing with the DM why from the perspective offunctional equivalence and attempts to explain the factors that influence theirtranslator‘styles, including consideration of functional equivalence, target readerships,and drama translation.This corpus-based study of translations of the DM why intends to play asupplementary role in translation studies of Shakespeare‘s plays, and hopefully it willprovide a fresh perspective for other researchers in translation studies.