On The English Translation Of Chinese Existential Sentences From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts

Existential sentence,a hot topic in the academic circles for a long time,has been discussed and analyzed by many experts and scholars both at home and abroad.Generally speaking,existential sentence is a sentence pattern which expresses the existence,appearance or disappearance of things or persons at a specific time or place in semantics.Its structure can be divided in to three sections,that is,time and place words +verbs +noun phrases.And in pragmatics,it is usually used to describe a scene or a place.Mo Yan,a well-known Chinese writer,was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012,which brought him more honor and fame after this event.More and more scholars both from home and abroad have studied his works,some from the ontology of the works,and some from the translation versions.The success in winning the Nobel Prize should not only be attributed to his own writing characteristic "magic realism",but also Howard Goldblatt's wonderful translation versions.Mo Yan is a prolific writer,especially good at writing novels.The environment description,one of the three essential elements of fiction,contains two aspects:natural environment and social environment.This element appears in Mo Yan's novels mainly in the form of existential sentences.Therefore,on the basis of these,the thesis integrates the study of existential sentences,the original Chinese existential sentences in Mo Yan's novels and the English existential sentences in Howard Goldblatt's translation versions together,thus exploring the English translation of Chinese existential sentences.The theory of translation shifts was put forward in 1960s by John Catford,a famous linguist and translation theorist,in his masterpiece A Linguistic Theory of Translation,the only monograph on translation theory in his life.In 1990s,Professor Mu Lei translated this book,introducing this theory into china.Translation shifts mean departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to target language.According to the level and category of language,translation shifts can be divided into two major shifts:level shifts and category shifts.Firstly,the thesis makes a comprehensive collation and classification of the existential sentences in four selected Mo Yan's works,Red Sorghum,Big Breasts&Wide Hips,Shifu,You'll Do Anything For a Laugh and Change:What Was Communism,extracts the corresponding translation text of Howard Goldblatt's versions,establishing a corpus.Next the thesis investigates the similarities and differences between Chinese and English existential sentences.Then,from the perspective of translation shifts,the author analyzes the translation shifts adopted by Howard Goldblatt in his English translation,summing up the general patterns in translating different types of existential sentences in Mo Yan's novels by means of translation shifts.Finally,on the basis of previous studies,the author tries to generalize a modal of Chinese-English translation of existential sentences,wishing to make a contribution to the translation.In the course of the study,the author finds that:except for the similarities in semantic function and sentence structure of Chinese and English existential sentences,there are more differences in the sequence of sentence,syntactic components and other respects between Chinese and English existential sentences;Howard Goldblatt flexibly makes a variety of translation shifts in his translation,except the intra-system shifts.Due to the differences in the syntactic structure of existential sentences in English and Chinese,the frequency of structure shift is the highest in the translation process.As for the C-E translation modal of existential sentences,the details are as follows:Level shifts of tense are often adopted when translating "A +B(V ?)+C" sentence;When it comes to the translation of "A +B(?)+C" existential sentence,it is a good choice to translate into "there be" sentence pattern by means of using structure shifts from subject to adverbial;Structure shifts from object to subject are adopted in translating "A +B(V ?)+C"and "A+B(V +directional words)+C" sentence patterns;"A+B(V ?)+C" existential sentences are often translated by means of structure shifts from active to passive voice;Class shifts occurs when translating "A+C" existential sentence;And in many cases,no shift happens,that is,literal translation,when translating "A+B(V ?)+C" and "A+B(?)+C"sentences.