| Personal pronouns, as a universal of human languages, play an important role in human communications, and have been an easy-to-ignore but indispensible issue in linguistics. Previous studies have provided implications, but there are some research gaps. Firstly, there are some weak points, such as small corpus and manual counting in previous studies, so the results of enlarged data could be more convincing. Secondly, some studies have discussed how to translate English personal pronouns into Chinese from the perspective of translation theories, but introspective data could hardly reflect the real use of personal pronouns, hence empirical studies are necessary. Thirdly, some studies from the perspective of translation universals didn’t explore source language and statistical testing may be more convincing.This study investigates English and Chinese personal pronouns from two perspectives, which combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. The purposes are to testify the previous conclusions of the similarities and differences of personal pronouns in English and Chinese; to explore the different translation methods of English personal pronouns; to explore the characteristics of personal pronouns in translated Chinese and the possible reasons.The major findings are as follows:(1) Frequency of personal pronouns in original English novels (9.4%) is higher than original Chinese novels (3.8%) and translated Chinese novels (5.9%).(2) The major translation method is correspondence (72%), and then omission (24%) and substitution (4%). Personal pronouns in translated Chinese have the tendency of exlicitation and implicitation. Personal pronouns in translated Chinese have significant differences from those in original Chinese. So translators should adopt proper methods to translate English personal pronouns and researchers should not talk about exlicitation and implicitation generally and should depend on the concrete language phenomena. |
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