A Study On Chinese-English Translation Skills Of Chinese Adverbials With The Semantic Meaning Of Subjectivity

This thesis makes an attempt to probe into 5 kinds of C-E translation skills of subjectivity-oriented semantic meaning with Chinese adverbials.Based on a review of the related literature,it is found that a Chinese adverbial can find its way flexibly in different syntactical slots in a Chinese sentence but changes its semantic meaning of subjectivity either slightly or steeply.Linguists hold that Chinese adverbials tend to enhance or reduce their extent of subjectivity when anchored in different syntactical slots of a Chinese sentence.It is reviewed by a preliminary finding that,the above-mentioned linguistic phenomenon even perplexes many native speakers of Chinese,not to mention the learners of Chinese as a foreign language.Through an analysis of English adverbials,there is every indication that subjectivity with various extent also exists in different syntactical positions.This thesis believes that the semantic meaning accompanied with subjectivity is a kind of constructional meaning.Therefore,to expound this language phenomenon,it is necessary to rely on the Cognitive Linguistics? theory of Construction Grammar as the analytical tool.In this thesis,the subjectivity generated from adverbials is called derived subjectivity,and each sentence pattern with a same adverbial appeared in different syntactical slot is regarded as a different construction.What follows is a categorization of sentences equipped with adverbials,which are categorized into the simple adverbial construction and the complex adverbial construction,respectively.And then the two general kinds of adverbial constructions are fractionized further into five sub-constructions,namely the simple pre-adverbial sub-construction,the simple mid-adverbial sub-construction,the complex pre-adverbial sub-construction,the complex mid-adverbial sub-construction and the complex post-adverbial sub-construction.By giving a contrastive analysis of the derived subjectivity?s construction mechanism in both Chinese and English adverbials from each sub-construction,the study sheds light on similarities(the derived subjectivity is constructed through adverbials? syntactical position in both languages)and different features mainly embodied in grammatical structures owing to differences between English and Chinese thought patterns.It is only possible to make a panoramic view of the differences when Chinese adverbials are converted into English equivalents,and following this line of thinking,this thesis discusses the C-E translation skills with those aforesaid five adverbial sub-constructions from the macroscopic point of view.To conclude,this thesis clarifies the construction mechanism of the derived subjectivity in both Chinese and English adverbials from 5 sub-constructions,and there are 5 most important translation skills as follow:(1)syntactical position equivalence;(2)semantic orientation equivalence;(3)syntactical component equivalence;(4)perspective equivalence;and(5)logical relationship equivalence.It is hoped that our research is of some implication to Cognitive Linguistics,translations studies,and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.