| Partitives are a linguistic concept that mirrors quantity in reality.Body partitives,a subcategrozation of partitives,refer to the nouns denoting human body parts or organs to modify entities or mass related to them literally or metaphorically.Apart from the quantizing function of partitives,body partitives are characterized by its function of indicating shape and size and can reflect the cognitive mechanism.So far studies about body partitives have been focused on classification,semantic analysis and cognitive mechanism.Few have been devoted to the comparison between English and Chinese body partitives based on quantitive study,not to mention their translation.The present study takes a corpus-based approach to cross-linguistic comparison of body partitives in English and Chinese,on which suggestions on translation are proposed.First of all,a query list of body partitives is determined based on daily use and previous study.All the query words are retrieved in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and The Independent Corpus.The next is to filter the instances that meet the requirement of body partitives.The performance of body partitives is analyzed via normalized frequency and collocation respectively.At last,a comparison between Chinese and English is made to find out the similarities and differences,on which translation methods are proposed.The followings are the major findings:Firstly,there are a number of similarities in Chinese and English: 1)Sensory partitives are highly frequent in both languages.2)In terms of head nouns,the ratio of nominal partitives highly exceeds that of verbal partitives.What is more,concrete nouns are the most frequent head nouns that body partitives collocate with.The similarities can be contributed to the common embodiment.Secondly,despite the similarities,there remain differences: 1)Chinese body partitives are much more commonly used,while English body partitives are characterized by a wider variety of types.2)The frequency of body partitives,with the function of indicating shape and size,is much higher in Chinese.3)With regard to collocation,Chinese body partitives are characterized by dynamics.Verbal partitives are more frequently used in Chinese.Furthermore,the frequency of verbal nouns is higher than that of abstract nouns in Chinese,which is opposite in English.4)Internal organ partitives are specific in English,which indicates English body partitives are characterized by its three-dimension.In a sum,westerners emphasize functions of organs,while Chinese highlight shape.Thirdly,it is proposed that domestication is the optional strategy due to different usage and cognitive mechanism of Chinese and English.Under the guidance of domestication,it is proposed that the combination of semantic translation and communicative translation is translation strategy.The specific methods lie in liberal and literal translation.More specifically,omission,substitution and conversion are the translation techniques in liberal translation.In a word,domestication renders translated texts closely conform to the target culture,which may enhance the readability and acceptability.Additionally,parallel corpora provide evidence that most translators at home and abroad prefer to use domestication.The present study shed light on comparative studies on other types of quantifiers.More importantly,the findings can be applied into translation practice of body partitives,rendering translation as equivalent as possible in a dynamic way under the guidance of domestication.In addition,the findings will presumably to facilitate second foreign language learners’ Chinese or English study. |
