A Corpus-based Study Of Translation Universals

The study of translation universals is an important way to summarize the characteristics of translated texts.The characteristics in translated poems can be explored by studying poetry translation universals.These characteristics distinguish source texts from target texts,and distinguish translated texts from non-translated texts.In this thesis,hypotheses of simplification,explicitation and normalization are confirmed in the English translation of modern Chinese poems based on the corpus method.Four corpora are established for the study.Chinese Corpus contains 191original Chinese poems from Modern Chinese Poems:Chinese-English and Anthology of Chinese Poetry,2018 Edition of both Chinese and English.Translated Corpus includes the English versions of all the poems from the above two books.At the same time,Parallel Corpus is established for qualitative research.English Corpus,which is established for intralingual comparison,collects 12920^th-century original English poems randomly selected from The Norton Anthology of Poetry(5^th Edition).Based on the above four corpora,this study analyzes TTR,STTR,lexical density,average line length,readability,conjunctions,pronouns,high frequency words,nominalized words and rare words so as to confirm hypotheses of simplification,explicitation,and normalization in poetry translation.The study finds that（1）hypotheses of simplification,explicitation and normalization are confirmed as a whole;（2）the features of simplification are not apparent when average line length is studied,and the features of explicitation are not apparent when conjunctions are studied mainly due to the influence of main idea,rhyme and structure of the original Chinese poems;（3）English translated poems have some different features of translation universals from translated novels and translated non-literary texts.For example,translated poems have lower proportion of lexical density because of their lower proportion of verbs,but translated novels have lower proportion of lexical density because of their lower proportion of nouns;the proportion of personal pronouns in translated poems is higher than that in translated non-literary texts,but much lower than that in translated novels.This thesis confirms hypotheses of simplification,explicitation and normalization in the English translation of modern Chinese poems based on quantitative and qualitative research.The thesis expands the application of simplification,explicitation and normalization in different genres,and gives guidance for the use of corpus in poetry translation universals to some extent.