| The Unique Items Hypothesis,which is also called “under-representation of target language unique items hypothesis”,was first proposed by Tirkkonen Condit in 2004.It claims that the items which are untranslatable,unique in the target language or non-existent in the source language are usually inadequate in translation.The empirical studies on this hypothesis so far has been rarely and confined to Nordic Languages such as Finnish,Swedish and so on.The cognitive explanations on this hypothesis mainly are the Cognitive Salience Framework and the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis proposed by Sandra Halverson.The Gravitational Pull Hypothesis points out the salient structures in translation process will have gravitational pull on the translation,which includes the gravitational pull of the Source Language,the gravitational pull of the Target Language,and the gravitational pull of the correspondence between the Source Language and the Target Language.Based on two comparable corpora,the Zhejiang University Corpus of Translational Chinese(ZCTC)and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese(LCMC)which is comparable with ZCTC in contents,structure and period,as well as the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus,this study explores the representation of the unique item,particles which include the auxiliary and the modal particle,in translational Chinese,to test whether the Unique Items Hypothesis can be verified in translational Chinese.Chinese particles mainly consists of the modal particles,structural particles,tense particles and so on.From the data collected in the above mentioned corpora,this paper finds that compared with native Chinese,the overall modal particles are under-represented in translational Chinese while the overall auxiliaries which include the structural particles,tense particles and other particles are over-represented.When searched each particle respectively,this paper finds that their representations are different.After analyzing the ones whose difference is statistically significant(LL≥20,p<0.05),we find that the most of the modal particles include me么,ya呀,le了and ba罢are under-represented.In terms of the auxiliary,de的,suo所,laishuo来说,yiyang一样and eryan而言are over-represented,while deng等,zhi之,and zhe着are under-represented.The results indicate that the Unique Items Hypothesis is partly verified in translational Chinese.On the basis of the empirical research,this paper tries to analyze the cognitive basis of the different representation of these particles from three perspectives,namely,the gravitational pull of the Source Language,the gravitational pull of the Target Language,and the gravitational pull of the correspondence between the two languages.In a translation task,a schematic network is activated by lexical and grammatical structures in the source language.Within this activated network,which also includes nodes of target language words and grammatical structures,highly salient structures of the source language will exert a gravitational pull,resulting in an over-representation in translation of the specific corresponding target language lexical and grammatical structures.For example,the over-representation of suo 所 sentences in translational Chinese is partly resulted from the gravitational pull of the salient grammatical structure in the Source Language,namely the nominal structure in English.Similar to the source language,the salient cognitive structures in the target language also have the gravitational pull in translation tasks.When express the similar meaning in target language,the more salient ones will be chosen.For example,when the translator wants to choose a concise auxiliary to express the attributive meaning,the salient node,the auxiliary de 的 is more likely to be chosen other than the auxiliary zhi 之.In translation situations where there is no conceptual overlap between the nodes associated with a given target language structure and any specific source language structure,there is under-representation of that target language structure relative to non-translated text,since there is no cognitive salience in the accessed networks acting as a force in the translation of such items,which is called the gravitational pull of the correspondence between two languages.The under-used phenomenon of modal particles may due to the reason that there is no formal equivalents in English to act as a force in the translation of such items.Similarly,when the corresponding semantic nodes in the source language are more abundant than the target language,there are more opportunities for this node to be activated in the cognitive process of translation.For example,the over-representation of the auxiliary de 的 is partly caused by the fact that de have abundant semantic nodes to be activated in the cognitive process of translation. |
