Abstract
On the basis of a large amount of corpus-based studies on translation works, the translation universals hypothesis is proposed. As it claims, translations enjoy some general features and Baker (1993) summarizes them into three universals, namely simplification, explicitation, and normalization, which are supported by many following researches. However, some of the later studies contradict with these rules in several ways, and the usages of passive voice and pronouns are the two most controversial issues. Previous researches suggest that according to the universal features of explicitation and normalization, translated texts tend to have a lower frequency of pronouns while over-representing the passive voice. To examine such claimings, 160 original English abstracts from two leading journals in the field of translation studies, The Translator and Translation Studies, and another 160 English abstracts from Chinese Translator Journal and Chinese Science & Technology Translators Journal, which are translated from Chinese abstracts, are collected. Two corpora are then constructed, namely the Original English Abstracts Corpus (OEAC) and Translated English Abstracts Corpus (TEAC). The CLAWS Part-of-speech Tagger is used to tag the lexical items and word processing tool AntConc 3.2.4 is used for retrieving the words. The comparison between the two corpora suggests that the translated English abstracts contain a lower level of frequency in the use of both passive voice and pronouns, which partially query the hypothesis of explicitation and normalization. A detailed analysis shows a higher frequency of past-tense passives in the OEAC and more passives in perfect tense in the TEAC. The OEAC also contains more relative pronouns while the other contains more indefinite pronouns. The norm theory is utilized to account for such phenomena. The detailed results of the study are expected to shed some lights on professional translating and academic writing.
Highlights
1.1 Background of the StudyAs the world develops, the connections between different countries become closer, in economic relations and in social and cultural communications
Based on the research results, the researcher finds that: 1) the original English writers have an obvious preference for the past tense and present progressive tense of passive voice; 2) the Chinese translators tend to use slightly more present tense of passives and strikingly more the “higher-level” perfect tense of passive voice; 3) the original English writers use far more relative pronouns and a little more personal and reflexive pronouns than the Chinese scholars; 4) Chinese translators prefer to use more indefinite pronouns and possessive pronouns; 5) the original English abstracts are much longer than the translated ones on average
The first aspect of the implications of this study is concerned with the translation universal hypotheses
Summary
1.1 Background of the StudyAs the world develops, the connections between different countries become closer, in economic relations and in social and cultural communications. The important role of translation is realized by the public society, which boosts the research of translation among the linguists. The rapid development of computer-aided corpus linguistics in 1990s on the other side sheds a new light into the studies of translation, which makes it possible for the studies of translations on a large scale. As more and more translation works have been studied on the basis of corpus, some universal features have been found, which are attached to translation works regardless of the translators and the source languages. The translation universals hypothesis has been put forward, first summarized by the British linguist Mona Baker (1993), who states that all the translated works might share a fixed group of characteristic features “as a mediated communicative event”, no matter who the translator is and from which language it was translated. The emerging of translation corpora in this respect covers the shortage of previous studies, providing a new scientific tool for many practical problems in studying translation issues, expanding the research scope and bringing in a new perspective of study
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