On The Translation Of "Le" As An Aspect Marker From The Perspective Of Semantic Translation

It is basically acknowledged that Chinese is an aspect-prominent language while English is a tense-prominent one.But aspect and tense are not two completely contradictory concepts because in Chinese aspect can perform the function of time reference as English does with tense.However,such a function of aspect is not necessarily the same under independent and complex contexts.Aspects can be divided into lexical aspect which serves to indicate eventuality types and grammatical aspect which represents different ways of looking at the internal time structure of a certain eventuality.“Le”(了)is one of the aspect markers in Chinese,which is frequently used with verbs in Chinese texts,forming the structure of “verb+le”.In a sentence,the verb used as a predicate represents a certain eventuality type and there are four kinds of verbs representing four kinds of eventuality types that have different semantic features.Meanwhile,the grammatical features of “le” are not fixed depending on what kind of eventuality the verb before it represents.Given this,this study will discuss the translation of the structure “verb+le” for the consideration of feasibility.Newmark’s semantic translation theory will be adopted in this study,which aims to find out how the temporal semantic features of “verb+le” will be reproduced in its corresponding translation.Beijing Zhe Die(《北京折叠》)written by Chinese writer Hao Jingfang and its English translation Folding Beijing by Ken Liu have been chosen as the texts to be studied.Despite a number of studies on the two texts,few have approached them in the same way as the one to be done in this thesis and no research has systematically discussed the translation of‘le”as an aspect marker under both independent and complex contexts like the one to be done in this study.In short,this thesis will,based on the semantic translation theory,try to explore the translation of“le”as an aspect marker in sentences with different eventuality types under independent and complex contexts and try to answer the following three research questions:(1)Why will independent and complex contexts influence the translation of“le”as an aspect marker?(2)How will such an influence be reflected in the translation of“le”?(3)How will eventuality types represented by the verb influence the translation of“le”?By applying both qualitative and quantitative data from a comparative study and statistical analysis,this study has found that(1)context factor may exert influence on the translation of “le” as an aspect marker in the structure “verb+le” in two aspects:tense choice and syntax function transformation.(2)such an influence may be observed in two ways: Considerations surrounding tense choice when translating “verb+le” under independent context are simpler than those under complex context;syntax function transformation is involved in translating “verb+le” under complex context as it is likely to be translated into non-verbs,which does not happen under independent context.(3)eventuality types represented by the verb in “verb+le” mainly influence the translation of “le” by limiting the choice of verbs in the target text when “verb+le” is translated into verbs.This study,based on concepts of aspect and tense in Chinese and English,and with Newmark’s semantic translation theory as the theoretical reference,has explored the translation of “verb+le” in Beijing Zhe Die,which has so far remained a research blank.The way this study approaches the research texts has also provided a new perspective for the application of the semantic translation theory.However,the conclusions drawn in this study may not apply to other texts,particularly non-literary works,since great differences exist in texts of different genres.Besides,some patterns may have not been unearthed in this study given that the chosen corpus is not large enough to cover all linguistic phenomena.Therefore,it is expected that translation of “verb+le” in other kinds of texts based on the semantic translation theory or other feasible theories will be explored and the corpus for research will be expanded to provide more persuasive conclusions in the future.