A Corpus-based Study On The Translations Of Conjunctions In And Then There Were None

In recent years,many scholars in China have studied the literary level and artistic value of And Then There Were None,but the research on the conjunctions based on this work is still at the starting stage.This thesis selects this novel and its two Chinese translations-Ge Dewei’s version and Qi Ahong’s version as the corpus text,among the two versions,Ge’s was published in 1980,which was just after the reform and opening up,and Qi’s version was published in 2008.Then the author built two small parallel bilingual corpora,and compared the translation of conjunctions in the original work through Tmxmall.By use of the data processed by corpus tools from the parallel and comparable corpus perspectives to do some qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,the author make further investigation and focus on the translations respectively,aiming to further verify the explicitation phenomenon of English novels in the process of Chinese translation,and analyze the motivation of the degree,and for the expansion of the theoretical study of translational commonality.This thesis makes a qualitative analysis by analyzing the data retrieved by AntConc,and is compared with the conjunctions in the two versions.According to the data retrieved from AntConc and the analysis of the author,the explicitation of conjunctions does exist in the two versions and indeed presents differences.And then analyze the causes from three perspectives: causes of translation process,causes of cultural background,together with causes of translator and readers’ expectation.In the analysis of specific data,this thesis gives some examples of the conjunction “if” which can indicate the condition and the conjunction “but” which can indicate the adversative.Through comparative research,it is concluded that there are obvious trends in the adversative relation and conditional relation of the conjunctions in the two translations.However,the degrees of explicitation varies from version to version,Qi’s version appears more explicit than Ge’s version because of the difference between the translator’s purpose and the varied historical background of the two translators.