A Corpus-based Study On Translation Of English Anaphora Into Chinese

Anaphora is a significant kind of cohesive devices in text both in English and Chinese. Previous researches on anaphora are generally conducted from linguistic perspectives, studies on anaphora translation only account for a minor percentage. There are two problems concerning the current researches on anaphora translation. First of all, the researches confuse the classification of English anaphora with that of Chinese. It is widely accepted that C hinese anaphora can be classified into NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora. So for English anaphora the researches adopt the same way. However, because of the differences between the two languages, the types of anaphora are also different. Secondly, some translation methods are put forward though they are not convincing enough. By examining some cases, translation methods are concluded without explaining in what situation the translation methods are employed. And the possibility of corresponding relationship between English and C hinese anaphora has also not been taken into account. To solve the problems, this paper is to analyze the transference of anaphora when English anaphora is translated into Chinese by corpus study.The thesis mainly focuses on the following questions:(1) Is there a corresponding pattern between English and Chinese anaphora?(2) How and in what linguistic environment the different types of English anaphora can correspond to Chinese anaphora?(3) How to translate the English anaphora which cannot correspond to Chinese anaphora? The current research classifies English anaphora into five types: nominal anaphora, verbal anaphora, adjective anaphora, adverbial anaphora and sentential anaphora. Chinese anaphora includes NP anaphora, pronominal anaphor and zero anaphora. 15 discourses are extracted out from English novels as well as 15 corresponding Chinese editions to make an English-Chinese bilingual corpus. The author studies on the linguistic environment where the transition of anaphora occurs and analyzes all the English anaphora and their translation in the corpus so that the conclusion of a corresponding pattern between English anaphora and C hinese anaphora as well as other translation methods could be reached.The research findings are as follows:(1) There exists a corresponding pattern between English and C hinese anaphora but they do not completely correspond to each other.(2) Nominal anaphora in English can correspond to any type of C hinese anaphora; adjective anaphora is usually translated into a pronoun as a part of NP anaphora; adverbial anaphora corresponds to C hinese pronominal anaphora; the corresponding anaphoric forms of sentential anaphora are NP anaphora and pronominal anaphora.(3) For those having no corresponding forms, they are usually converted or omitted. Verbal anaphora is usually converted into verbs or omitted. Adverbial anaphora could also be omitted.