A Corpus-Based Study On The Translation Of Negative Words In The Scarlet Letter

In translation practice,the translation of negation is a difficult point,and the negative structure in classic literature works are more complicated.This thesis,combines corpus method and translation studies on negation,taking The Scarlet Letter and Chinese translated versions by Han Shiheng and Yao Naiqiang as linguistic material,and self-builds two bi-lingual parallel corpora on small scale.This study mainly discusses the classifications of negative words,analyzes the structure of highly-frequent negative words in English,and combines translation theory to interpret the features of Chinese translation of negation.First of all,in this study,based on computer software,such as EmEditor for text de-noising and Tmxmall for text paralleling,English and Chinese translated texts are paralleled sentence by sentence.Secondly,by virtue of the “clusters” in AntConc 3.3.0,the single-language retrieval software,according to the classifications of negative words in English and frequent negative words in Chinese literature works,highly-frequent negative words are obtained by single-item retrieval.Through retrieval in two corpora,this thesis selects four negative words in high frequency in English text,that is “not”,“no”,“never” and “without”.Verified by the results of “clusters” and “collocations” in AntConc 3.3.0,this thesis concludes the structures of negative words,and analyzes the translation features in these two Chinese translated versions.Combining the specific contexts of negative words,the structures of negative words are divided into five types that “not/no/never/without” followed by noun,adjective,adverb;predicate,mixed with modal verbs,have and be verbs;prepositional phrases;negative words in comparative form and in the beginning of sentence.Based on different structures,the translation features of Han and Yao are analyzed.The findings show that Yao is good at using four-character expressions in Chinese,wheres,this is less in Han's version;when negative words are followed by prepositional phrases,conversion is the common method employed by both translators;Yao adopts many Chinese adverbs to intensify the negative tone,however,it is not obvious in Han's version;negative words in comparative form can be directly translated to obvious comparative relationship or freely translated to affirmative form;double negation can be freely translated to affirmative or directly to double negation;multiple negation can be translated on the basis of division.Therefore,the characteristics and methods found out in this paper provide specific practical methods for the translation of English negative words to Chinese,for reference and application,including the adoption of four-character Chinese expressions,conversion,Chinese adverbs,literal and free translation,and division.