| Corpus researches have shown that lexical items in actual language use tend to co-occur with other words with specific semantic features,belonging to certain grammatical categories and expressing specific attitudinal meanings.Sinclair(1996)defines the phrasal unit formed by multiple categories of co-selection as the extended units of meaning(EUM).The model of EUM is defined by five parameters,that is,node,collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody.Integrating form,meaning,and function in one unit,EUM model provides a more comprehensive framework for language description.Popular phrases are the combinations of words to convey new ideas and things.They are novel language phenomena and widely used by the discourse community.This paper takes the model of EUM as the framework and takes popular Chinese phrases and their translation equivalents as research objects in an attempt to explore the phraseological features of Chinese popular phrases and the characteristics of how these Chinese popular phrases are conveyed across languages.The research questions of this study are as follows:(1)What are the characteristic features of popular Chinese phrases in collocational behaviour and semantic prosody?(2)What are the characteristic features of the translation equivalents of popular Chinese phrases in collocational behaviour and semantic prosody?(3)What are the characteristic features of the translation activity of popular phrases?The present study chooses hong2huang1zhi1li4(洪荒之力),gong1jiang4jing1shen2(工匠精神)and lu1qi3xiu4zi3jia1you2gan4(撸起袖子加油干)as research objects.This study compiles three self-built corpora respectively for the observation of three popular Chinese phrases and chooses COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)to justifies whether translation equivalents can truthfully convey the meanings of popular Chinese phrases.Corpus-based approach is adopted in this research.After these samples were analyzed in depth,the research data was obtained.The major findings of this research are as follows:(1)Compared with the original phrasal units or extended units of the related nodes,popular phrases are likely to change in terms of collocation and colligation,but all tend to change significantly in semantic prosody.(2)Related English nodes have their own specific collocational behaviour and their own characteristic features of semantic prosody.However,the translation equivalents of popular phrase differ greatly from those English nodes in terms of collocational behaviour and semantic prosody.(3)The translation of popular phrases usually relies on the correspondence at the level of collocation.As popular phrases tend to express new concepts and ideas,there is hardly ready-made equivalents in the target language.Therefore,it is difficult to convey the exact semantic prosody of Chinese popular phrases into the target language and achieve functional equivalence.These findings above reveal the the main factors in influencing translation equivalence from the perspective of phraseology.This study verifies Sinclair’s point of view that semantic prosody plays a leading role in determining the meaning and function of a phrase.Translation equivalent is likely to differ from the related phrasal units in terms of semantic prosody,which will affect the transmission of attitudinal meaning and cause misunderstanding.Popular phrases usually carry new semantic prosody,which can reveal the difficulties of cross-linguistic transmission of ideologies and shed light on translation teaching and research. |
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