A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Linguistic Features Of Translated Chinese Fiction And Translated English Fiction

Translation Universals hypotheses (TUs) is an important concept in contemporary Translation Studies, particularly in corpus-based empirical research of translational language. TUs are defined as the specific features of translated texts as a linguistic variation, which is in line with the "third code" proposed by Frawley (1984), and is of great significance to the research on the cognitive process of translation. The thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of linguistic features of translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction in view of TUs, so as to peruse the distinctive linguistic features of translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction in relation to their native counterparts as well as to observe the recurrent features shared by both of them, namely, the hypothetical Simplification, Explicitation, and Normalization features of translational language.The research questions are:first, what distinctive linguistic features do translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction have compared with the non-translated counterparts? Second, what linguistic features do translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction have in common? If there do exist TUs, the writer hypothesizes, both of them will be more simplified, explicit, and normalized than their non-translated counterparts, and they will thus share certain linguistic features such as Simplification, Explicitation, and Normalization.In order to testify these hypotheses, the writer attempts to compare and analyze the linguistic properties of translated fiction in relation to the native counterpart in Chinese and English respectively. Then, the writer goes on to contrast the linguistic features of translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction to testify whether both of them are more simplified, explicit, and normalized than their native counterparts. Four fiction corpora are used in the study, i.e. fiction sub-corpus of Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC), fiction sub-corpus of ZJU Corpus of Translational Chinese (ZCTC), fiction sub-corpus of Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), and fiction sub-corpus of Corpus of Translational English (COTE).The findings reveal:first, translated Chinese fiction is more simplified (i.e. less informational load and lower ratio between content words and function words) and more explicit (i.e. more frequent use of personal pronouns and connectives) than non-translated Chinese fiction, whereas the linguistic parameters including modal particles and bei passives seem to contradict the feature of Normalization (i.e. lower frequency of modal particles and higher frequency of bei passives); second, translated English fiction is more simplified (i.e. less informational load and lower ratio between content words and function words), more explicit (i.e. more frequent use of personal pronouns and connectives, coupled with longer average sentence length), and more normalized (lower frequency of passives) than the non-translated counterpart; third, translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction do share certain linguistic features including Simplification and Explicitation. However, it should be noted that they also show different features by means of translating. For example, translated English fiction shows the feature of Normalization, whereas translated Chinese fiction does not.The study of linguistic features of translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction in the thesis has contributed a lot to the current English-based TUs. It appears that although the feature of Normalization is not shared by translated Chinese fiction and translated English fiction, numerous linguistic parameters have testified such TUs as Simplification and Explicitation. As far as the writer is concerned, this may be due to the fact that the current TUs are mainly based on English or English-similar languages. As a result, it is recommended by the writer to carry out a corpus-based contrastive study of distant translational languages such as Chinese and English, especially to focus on the study of registers or genres in translational languages, so as to better understand and verify the current TUs.