A Contrastive Study Of English Translations Of Chinese Reduplicated Adjectives And Their Bases

Chinese is a syllable-based language, for which reduplications come into being in its development; English is a phoneme-based language, for which the priority is given to morphological changes in its development. Chinese adjectives obtain richer grammatical meanings and more grammatical functions through reduplication, which show the infiniteness of subjectivity of Chinese and embody its weak boundedness and continuity. Meanwhile, English reduplication is a morphological process with no grammatical meaning enriched mainly through a repetition of onomatopoetic words. Therefore, how are Chinese reduplicated adjectives translated into English? Through a tentative observation, it finds that Chinese reduplicated adjectives and their bases are more often than not translated into the same English expressions. What is the motivation behind this phenomenon with respect to the fact that Chinese reduplicated adjectives are very different from their bases grammatically. Are there any other translation choices for Chinese reduplicated adjectives? And what the motivations behind the choices are deserves further study. Previous studies on reduplicated adjectives focus on a certain type of reduplicated adjectives, or all types of reduplicated adjectives yet with no comparison with their bases, but without further exploration on the motivation behind different translation phenomena.This research, combining quantitative and qualitative study, adopting Lv Shuxiang's subcategorization of Chinese reduplicated adjectives, conducts a relatively comprehensive and systematic contrastive study on the translation of Chinese reduplicated adjectives and their bases based on the parallel corpus; then it takes Lu Xun's novel Lu Xun Xiao Shuo Ji and its two English versions as the data to specifically explain the significance of conscious adaptation to the target language, the thinking mode and the target culture from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.This research finds that Chinese reduplicated adjectives are more often than not translated into the same English expressions as their bases, are condensed or even omitted. In the meantime, it also finds that the translator's mother tongue, his thinking mode as well as his own culture influence the process of translation. Generally speaking, the translation of the English-speaking translator or the Chinese-speaking translator reflects the thinking modes, and aesthetic views pragmatically in their own linguistic and cultural context and follows.This research maintains that Chinese-speaking and English-speaking translators should understand the differences between the two languages and cultures, and then make conscious adaptation to the target language and culture for a successful communication.