A Centering Theory Analysis of Discrepancies on Subject Zero Anaphor in English to Thai Translation

Abstract

Centering theory (CT) has been adopted in analyzing 84 zero anaphors in 50 informative texts. It is found that most zero anaphors occur in Continuation state both in English texts (source texts (ST)) and Thai translation (target texts (TT)). Zero anaphors in the TT outnumber those in ST and are found in more environments. In terms of translation, most zero anaphors in source texts remain in the same form in the target texts although some items are translated into different anaphor forms. Results indicate that zero anaphor is used to keep discourse coherence and to refer to the backward-looking center (Cb) of current utterances in both languages. Therefore, most zero anaphors in source texts are translated into zero anaphors in target texts when the CT transition state of utterances in source texts and target texts is Continuation, and are translated into other anaphors when the CT transition state in source texts is changed to another transition state in the target texts. Constraints in translation of zero anaphors can be explained in terms of anaphor interpretation, salience of entities, syntactic constraint, and naturalness of translation. However, this paper focuses only on one type of anaphor, namely subject zero anaphor; investigation of other types of anaphor will reveal other discrepancies in using and translating anaphors from this language pair.