A Study On The Identification Of Pseudotranslations Based On Simplification And Explicitation

This thesis, with the pseudotranslation The Castle of Otranto as example,attempts to use research results of corpus-based translation features of simplificationand explicitation to identify pseudotranslations. The aim is to propose an objectiveand effective identification method. By now, most of the studies on pseudotranslationidentification have been limited to the field of literature or history, and these criticalstudies have been carried out mainly by means of consulting historical literaturematerial and careful proof-reading, which is not only in difficulty with the availabilityof material, but also time-consuming, costly and subjective. Therefore, to make up forthe above shortcomings, this thesis tries to recognize pseudotranslations through themethod based on research results of corpus-based translation features of simplificationand explicitation from Mona Baker et al. In order to testify the feasibility, an Englishcomparable corpus was constructed, including two subcorpora. One is thepseudotranslation The Castle of Otranto corpus (TCO for short). The other is areference corpus (RC for short) which consists of nine English original classics withthe same genre as The Castle of Otranto by choosing about six thousand words fromeach work. For the need of study, each subcorpus was tagged through CLAWS7online.To verify the simplification, the author tested the standard type/token ratio(STTR), the lexical density (LD), the average sentence length (ASL), the averageword length (AWL) and the proportion of high frequency words (PHFW). The resultsshow that the LD, ASL and PHFW in TCO are relatively higher than those in RC, theSTTR in TCO is relatively lower than that in RC, and the AWL in TCO is slightlylower than that in RC. On exploration to the explicitation, the author examined theoccurrence frequencies of conjunctions, pronouns and the optional reporting that afterreporting verbs SAY, SEE and THINK. The results show that the occurrencefrequencies of conjunctions and the optional reporting that in TCO are relativelylower than those of in RC, and the frequency of pronouns in TCO is relatively higher than that of in RC.The empirical investigations into the translation features of thepseudotranslation The Castle of Otranto in simplification and explicitation reveal thatThe Castle of Otranto has no explicitation features at all, but the features ofsimplification behave inconsistently at different levels. This thesis holds that thefeatures of explicitation support the hypothesis of the thesis and can recognize thepseudotranslation of The Castle of Otranto but the features of simplification fail. Afterdetailed analysis, the validity of simplification testing indicators might have beenaffected by factors of pseudotranslator‘s own lexical features, creating purpose andpseudotranslation strategy. Thus, it reveals that other more effective measures areneeded in order to detect simplification features.