Corpus-Based Study On C-E Translation Of Univeristy Introductions In China

The speedy development of the Internet has altered not only the way people communicate,but also how domestic universities publicize themselves.English introduction of a university is like a business card,which is extremely essential for its internationalization development and serves as an important platform for foreign scholars and international students to acquaint themselves with the university.This thesis,based on the corpus-based study,uses Chesterman’s translation norms as the guiding theory and studies Chinese and English introductions of 25 domestic universities and English introductions of 30 foreign universities.It carries out a corpus-based study on the target texts and the parallel texts with the aid of a monolingual corpus and a bilingual corpus,and then employs corpus analysis tools to secure data and conduct analysis in order to discover the similarities and differences between the target texts and the parallel texts.The thesis analyzes the C-E translation of domestic university introductions from the perspective of Chesterman’s translation norms,that is,expectancy norms and professional norms,inquires into some common problems in the translation,and provides corresponding suggestions.Based on statistics and comparisons,the similarities and differences between the target texts(TTs)and the parallel texts(PTs)are as follow: 1)At the lexical level,the TTR and the STTR of the TTs are less than that of the PTs,which indicates the TTs have a lower vocabulary richness;Both the two have high lexical density with similar lexical density and utilize more nouns and adjectives,but the TTs uses relatively more adjectives;The average word length and word length(SD)of the TTs are both larger than the PTs,so the TTs are relatively more complex in vocabulary;in terms of high-frequency words,both of them have more functional words,but the PTs prefer to use “we”.2)At the syntactic level,both the two texts are long sentences and the average sentence length of the TTs is greater than that of the PTs,but the TTs is slightly smaller than the PTs in the sentence length(SD),so the syntactic complexity of the TTs is greater than the PTs;those two prefer to use structure of coordination and the conjunction “and” to achieve coherence.3)At the textual level,the two mostly use conjunctions as cohesive means,and the frequency of conjunctions in the TTs are slightly more than the PTs;the TTs are inclined to narrate themselves in the third person,while the PTs prefers to use the first person,especially the personal pronoun “we”;the average length of the text of the TTs is longer than the PTs.Therefore,the TTs are longer and more redundant but the PTs are shorter and more concise.Translation is a kind of behavior regulated by norms.Guided by Chesterman’s translation norms and taking English introductions of foreign universities as parallel texts,this thesis analyzes the C-E translation of domestic university introductions from the perspective of expectancy norms(the target readers’ expectations and economic and ideological factors)and professional norms(the accountability norm,the communication norm and the relation norm).The author discovers that although translators have chosen different strategies for various considerations,they have all deliberately or unintentionally complied with expectancy norms and professional norms.However,there exists some problems in the translation of domestic university introductions,such as excessive useless information,long length of the text,Chinglish,grammatical errors,format errors,etc.,which call for more attention from all parties involved in the translation process.