Parallel Corpus-based Study On The English Translation Of Chinese Verb Directional Constructions

Verb directional constructions (VDC), such as走进来,跑出去, are complex predicate constructions which consist of verbs and directional complements. Since the concept has been put forward, linguists have done extensive studies on Chinese VDCs, while few linguists pay attention to the English translation of VDCs. Studying the non-correspondence between Chinese VDCs and its English translation is of great theoretical interest because it helps to explore main translation strategies and main difficulties of complex predicate constructions.This study focuses on the structural and semantic pattern of three groups VDCs, namely,"V去"group,"V出"group and "V起来"group.534Chinese-English sentence pairs were retrieved from a Chinese-English parallel corpus. On the whole, all three groups of VDCs tend to be translated to the verb form of the original Chinese predicate, but with different complements. The most common form of VDCs’ translation is a verb collocating with a preposition, which makes up27.7percent of the total.The non-correspondences of grammatical features strongly correlate with argument structures. Also of great interest are the cases of the change of lexico-grammatical features would bring about the change in the argument structure. The addition of Theme would involve the adding of object, which could be justified from the great extent of correspondence between the Theme and the object in English.By explaining the translation of VDCs, this paper finds that the reasons for the non-correspondence in VDC translation can be categorized into the typological difference of Chinese and English on all linguistic levels, and genre features of translated texts.