A Corpus-Based Study Of Translation Universals On C-E Translated Chinese Enterprise Profiles

This paper based on corpus translation studies attempts to conduct a study of the translation universals based on business languages and make comparisons between the translated language and the source language and target language respectively, including intralingual as well as interlingual comparisons. Through a careful selection of the top 100 Zhejiang enterprise profiles in both Chinese and English versions as well as the American and British company profiles of the Fortune Global 500, three corpora are compiled and constructed. This paper compares Chinese Enterprise Profile in English with Chinese Enterprise Profile in Chinese and Foreign Enterprise Profile respectively by means of BFSU ParaConc 1.0 beta 21 and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator to answer the two questions. Firstly, from the perspective of lexical variety, lexical density, word frequency, mean sentence length, relative clauses and passive construction, how translation universals including simplification, explication and normalization are used? Secondly, why does it show such a usage of these translation universals?The research results show that the translated profiles of Chinese companies don’t fully support translation universals. Low lexical variety and lexical density show lexical simplification is verified but not significant because of the different living environment between translators and native English people and the different contents of the Chinese and foreign profiles; meanwhile, the syntactical simplification is falsified due to the influence of source language, target language and translating behavior. In addition, the translated versions tend to the explicitation of the subject so as to emphasize the subject on account of many impersonal sentences, and the logical relationship of Chinese sentences. Moreover, the "with" patterns as postpositive attributes and adverbials and passive constructions are frequently used, thus showing a normalization tendency. Therefore, translation universals may be a shifting phenomenon from source language to target language, far from applying to all the translating languages. This study contributes to a more overall understanding of translational universals.