A Corpus-based Study On Translation Universals In TCM Translation

Since translation universals were proposed and verified in corpus-based study by Mona Baker in 1993,an increasing number of scholars designed corpora with different genres to prove their existence in different translated languages.However,studies on translation universals abroad have investigated Indo-European languages only,while studies at home have verified the hypothesis mostly using novels,poems,political texts.None of the studies have verified translation universals in translated TCM text.Therefore,a parallel and a comparable corpus had been designed in this study to verify translation universals hypothesis in TCM translation from the perspectives of STTR,lexical diversity,high-frequency words,average word/sentence length as well as the usage of personal pronouns,conjunctions and prepositions.The parallel corpus is composed of the original text of Basic Theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine and its English translated text,with about 208,000 words.And the comparable corpus contains the English translated text of Basic Theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine and an original English medical text titled Essentials of Kumar & Clark's Clinical Medicine,with about 160,000 words.The results of the study are as follows:Firstly,apart from lexical density,the values of STTR,average word length and the proportions of high-frequency words in translated TCM text are smaller than those in non-translated medical English text,indicating words used in translated TCM text lack of variety and are simple in structure,which proves that translated TCM text bears the feature of lexical simplification to a large degree.Secondly,the values of average sentence length and text readability are bigger,and the frequencies of personal pronouns,conjunctions and prepositions are higher in translated TCM text than those in non-translated text,suggesting translated TCM text tends to use long sentences,personal pronouns,conjunctions and prepositions to express the loose and obscure TCM language in a well-organized and logical manner.Moreover,lexical density in translated TCM text is higher than that in non-translated Medical text,showing translated TCM text has a higher rate of content words.Therefore,it is concluded that translated TCM text bears explicitation feature at syntactic and semantic levels.