Study Of Translation Universals Of The Ministry Of Foreign Affairs' Translation Based On Self-compiled Parallel And Comparable Corpora

Translation universals refer to the common features of the translated languages.Previous study on translation universals are mainly qualitative studies.Since the birth of corpus translation study,an increasing number of scholars use corpora to conduct quantitative studies.However,most study subjects are literary texts,and research on applied texts are rarely seen.In particular,the corpus-based study on the translation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs(FMPRC)as diplomatic translation has not been found.Therefore,this paper aims to test whether FMPRC's translation demonstrates translation universals,especially simplification and explicitation.To achieve this goal,a parallel corpus and two comparable corpora are constructed.The parallel corpus consists of FMPRC's Chinese texts and their English translation.One of the two comparable corpus is composed of above-mentioned FMPRC 's translation and the English transcripts from the U.S.Department of States(DOS).The other comparable corpus includes the FMPRC 's translation and the transcripts of the British Foreign&Commonwealth Office(FCO).The author examines simplification from the aspects of the STTR,lexical density and mean sentence length,discovering that FMPRC 's translation does not reveal simplification tendency.In terms of explicitaiton,three indexes are covered,namely cohesive conjunctions,void optional word that,and long forms of BE,HAVE,WILL,NOT.In terms of the cohesive conjunctions,FMPRC'S translation does not reveal the explicitation tendency.While,in terms of the other two indexes,FMPRC's translation showcases the explicitation tendency.Thus,the translated texts of the FMPRC demonstrate explicitation to some extent.This quantitative study gives readers a deeper understanding of the translation style of FMPRC.From a macro perspective,its translation does not demonstrate simplification but showcase explicitation to some extent.From a micro perspective,FMPRC's translation reveals some specific preferences and tendencies in terms of the STTR,lexical density,mean sentence length,cohesive conjunctions,void optional word that,and long forms and contractions of BE,HAVE,WILL,NOT.