An Empirical Study Of Translation Universals With Special Reference To Bian Zhilin's Poetry Translation

With the rapid development of corpus linguistics,the corpus-based approach has matured into a new research paradigm of translation studies.Of the numerous corpus-based translation studies,many have been conducted to verify the hypothesis of translation universals proposed by Mona Baker.Great achievements have been made in this field both at home and abroad,but almost all translation data employed to validate the hypothesis in previous researches are collected from non-verse texts.Thus,it is desirable to verify the translation universal hypothesis with poetry translation.This thesis attempts to verify the hypothesis of translation universals with the poetry translation by Bian Zhilin(Bian for short),a poetry translator who himself is a great poet in the history of modern Chinese literature.As a poet translator,his poetry translation is expected to shed light on the nature of translation.Two corpora are built for this research: a monolingual comparable corpus comprising 44 Chinese poems by Bian and 74 Chinese renditions by Bian of English poems or poem excerpts;a bilingual parallel corpus composed of English poems and their Chinese versions by Bian.Efforts are made to verify the hypotheses of simplification,explicitation and implicitation.The specific questions to be answered are: 1)Will the hypotheses of simplification,explicitation and implicitation be validated by Bian's poetry translation? 2)If these hypotheses are confirmed,how are the translation universal features exhibited in Bian's poetry translation? If not,why?Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the textual data,the conclusions are drawn as follows:First,the standard type/token ratios(STTRs)of Bian's Chinese translation of English poems and his Chinese poems are both higher than the STTR of the original English poems.The corresponding word proportion of each line between English and Chinese fall within a normal range.As manifested by content words such as adjectives,verbs and adverbs,the lexical density of Bian's poetry translation is much higher than that of the original English poems.The textual information expanded through these content words shows that simplification does not exist in Bian's poetry translation though explicitation is obvious.Besides,the statistics of conjunctions and pronouns manifest,in a different way,the features of explicitation and implicitation.Second,with high proficiency in Chinese and English,Bian puts his translation principles of xin(faithfulness),si(similarity),and yi(interpretation)into practice.Despite the differences in language and culture between the east and the west,Bian is capable of keeping the form of the original English poems and meanwhile remaining faithful to their content in his rendition of these foreign poems.These are the possible factors which have contributed to the features of explicitation and implicitation in Bian's poetry translation.To conclude,the universal features of explicitation and implicitation are confirmed while the universal feature of simplification is not in Bian's poem translation.