A Study On The Translation Of Chinese And English Lexical Categories

As an important concept in cognitive linguistics, categories are a good way to have a better knowledge of the world by putting things into different classifications. This thesis discusses the translation of lexical categories in English and Chinese. As an empirical study, the Chinese novel Journey to the West and its English translation are analyzed through the main lexical categories in the novel.The notion of category can be traced back to the time of Aristotle, who held the classical approach that the things in one category must have some necessary and sufficient features and different categories have clear boundaries. The prototypical approach, however, claims that in each and every kind of category there is a prototype and the boundaries between categories are fuzzy.There are three levels of categories. The first is basic level, which is most common. The second is subordinate level, which is more specific than the basic level. The third is superordinate level, which is more general than the basic level.For the translation of lexical categories, there are four outcomes. The first and best one is equivalent translation, which means that the category in the translation is equal to that in the source text in terms of both meaning and level of categories. The second result is undertranslation, which implies that the category in the translation is more general than that in the original text. The third is overtranslation, the very opposite to undertranslation, with the category in the translation being more specific than that in the source language. The last is mistranslation which means that the category in the translation is totally different from that in the source text.There are different types of lexical categories, including general categories, culture-specific categories, and category extensions. General categories have terms like colours, unit terms, sound imitations, actions, and so on. Culture-specific categories, which is the focus of this thesis, cover five cultures, namely ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture, and linguistic culture. The last one, category extensions, contains two rhetorical devices, i.e. metaphor and metonymy. Apart from these, lexical categories can also be used as textual cohesive devices.A qualitative and quantitative study of the translation of lexical categories in the novel Journey to the West shows that a majority of the categories are translated equivalently. Apart from that, undertranslation is most likely to happen. The numbers of overtranslation and mistranslation are similar.For equivalent translation, the translator mostly uses the method of literal translation, together with other approaches like free translation, domestication, and foreignization.For the other three outcomes of translation, the main reason is the non-correspondence of lexical categories in Chinese and English. There are five aspects, namely non-correspondence in prototype, non-correspondence in category level, non-correspondence in category domain, non-correspondence in cultural meaning, and absence of category.To compensate for the non-equivalence of the translation of lexical categories, adding notes would be a good way.The thesis might be of some practical value to the translation of lexical categories in that some methods or strategies might as well be applied to the translation practice and some mistakes in translating lexical categories might be prevented.