A Corpus-based Study Of Translation Universals In Translated English From Hmong Oral Epics

Since Mona Baker first proposed the corpus-based studies of translation universals,many scholars have made intense discussions and conducted a series of empirical research to explore the features of translation universals.However,most of the studies are based on Indo-European and non-minorities literary works,thus more attention needs to be paid to language types and text genres.Ethnic epics are not only important carriers of ethnic culture but also inseparable parts of Chinese national culture.Hmong is one of the representative ethnic groups in China.The English translation of the Hmong iconic document Hmong Oral Epics has caused great repercussions in domestic and foreign academic circles,which has great significance to the promotion of the translation of ethnic literary works and the international dissemination of Chinese culture.Chinese literary translation studies have long focused on traditional Han literary works,while less attention has been paid to ethnic literary works.There has been no corpus-based research on translation universals of Hmong Oral Epics.This thesis is a corpus-based study,focusing on the features of translation universals(here only simplification,explicitation and normalization)in the English translation of Hmong Oral Epics.This study is based on a self-created comparable corpus.The corpus is composed of two sub-corpora,namely an English translation corpus of Hmong Oral Epics(HOEC)and an original English Epic Corpus(EEC).The corpus tools used in this study include corpus coding software Tree Tagger,corpus analysis software Word Smith Tools 4.0,corpus retrieval software Ant Conc 3.2.1,etc.Through the comparison and analysis of the two sub-corpora,the simplification,explicitation,and normalization features of translation universals are verified at both the lexical and the syntactic levels.The results of the study show that the translated text of Hmong Oral Epics has strong features of simplification and normalization,but does not show obvious features of explicitation.Simplification is mainly manifested in the significantly lower standardized type/token ratio and lexical density,and shorter average sentence length of the translated text when compared with the original text.Normalization is mainly manifested in the significantly higher frequencies of high-frequency words and passive voice of the translated text when compared with the original text.However,explicitation hypothesis is only testified by the personal pronoun subject,while the rest indices fail to reflect the explicitation tendency in the translated text of Hmong Oral Epics.The present research has both theoretical and practical significance.On the one hand,this research is helpful to deepen the understanding of translation universals and better understand the essence of the translation process.On the other hand,some of the research results can provide reference and enlightenment for the translation research on Chinese ethnic literary works.