A Corpus-based Study On The Comparative Analysis Of Translated Adversative Discourse Markers

Discourse markers are one of the common linguistic phenomena in verbal communication,but they are not entailed with truth value semantic relations.However,due to its procedural significance,discourse markers exert an essential role in discourse cohesion and coherence.As a kind of discourse markers,adversative discourse markers mainly refer to the internal meaning of transition with adversative markers.In addition,the diversity of discourse markers and the complexity of cross language exchanges lead to the situation where the translated discourse markers either English or Chinese,are not equivalent to the original text,which brings challenges to the translation of discourse markers.Based on the combination of discourse and translation studies,this thesis adopts a corpus-based approach to study the significance and value of English translation of Chinese discourse markers from a pragmatic perspective.This thesis selects three classic translations of "Nahan" and "Panghuang"--translated respectively by the Chinese reputed translator Yang Hisen-yi and his wife Gladys Yang,an American expert in Luxun’s studies William Lyell and the British translator and sinologist Julia Lovell.On the basis of the Chinese-English parallel corpus of Lu Xun’s novels,this thesis extracts the adversative discourse markers in the original and translation,selects four representative discourse markers(dan,sui ran,que and qi shi)and their English translations as a case study.Then this thesis obtains detailed statistics on the functions and translation strategies of adversative discourse markers and their translations with the help of corpus tools and software for data analysis.As there are significant differences between English discourse markers and Chinese discourse markers,therefore,in order to ensure the objectivity and accuracy of this study,this thesis carries out a qualitative analysis on the basis of quantitative analysis.Based on the theoretical framework of Schiffrin’s model,this thesis obtains the four pragmatic functions of the four adversative discourse markers studied in this thesis.Based on the chisquare data analysis,it is concluded that Yang’s and Lyell’s versions only have great significance in the restoration of the pragmatic function of the Ideational Structure,while Lovell’s translation has great significance in the restoration of both the Action Structure and the Ideational Structure.As far as the presentation of translation strategies is concerned,based on the data analysis,this thesis concludes that Yang’s and Lyell’s translations prefer to adopt literal translation,which has a high degree of content reduction and pays attention to the formal equivalence between the translation and the original texts;While Lovell’s translation mainly applies the translation strategies of creative translation and provincial translation,highlighting functional equivalence.Nevertheless,the three versions have,to some extent,restored the pragmatic functions of the four adversative discourse markers in Nahan and Panghuang.In the process of translating adversative discourse markers into English,their essence is a kind of embodiment from implicit to explicit,and the understanding and translation of their functions are limited by the specific context.In English translation,the translator should fully consider the practical pragmatic meaning of discourse markers in different contexts and semantics to better reproduce the pragmatic function and semantic expression of the original text,and thus accurate and appropriate translation expression can be explored.