A Corpus-Based Research On Translation Universals Of Translation Of Diplomatic Speeches

With the rapid development of China in terms of economy and culture,China's impact on the world is growing day by day.The diplomatic speeches as official political speeches convey the Chinese voice to the world and express China's political stance and national policy.Hence,the translation of diplomatic speeches is particularly significant.Translation universals hypothesis,put forward by Mona Baker in 1993,has been the battlefield of conflicting ideas in the circle of translation study ever since its come-into-being.Baker defines translation universals as the typical linguistic features that appear in the untranslated text,which have nothing to do with the source or target languages.In this regard,translation scholars conducted various studies within the paradigm of corpus translation studies,proving or perverting the translation universals hypothesis.However,most of these studies take the translations of literary works of Indo-European languages as the study objects,and the focus on text types and linguistic diversity need further improvement.In view of this,the author tries to use the corpus method to explore whether the commonality hypothesis of translation exist in diplomatic speeches at the macro and micro levels.This study examines in detail the standard type/token ration,vocabulary density,average word length,lexical difficulty,average sentence length,conjunctions and so on in the English translation of diplomatic speeches by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi from 2013 to 2016 and make a contrast with the diplomatic speeches of John Kerry,the contemporaneous Secretary of State of the United States,to verify whether the hypothesis of simplification,explicitation and normalization is established or not.The corpus tools used in this study include BFSU Stanford Pos Tagger,BFSU PowerConc,Range and Frequency,and BFSU Readability Analyzer.By comparing the English translations of Wang Yi's diplomatic speeches with Kerry's diplomatic speeches,this study finds that Wang Yi's English translation of diplomatic speeches does not fully have the characteristics of translation universals hypothesis.