A Corpus-Based Study of Nominalization in Translations of Chinese Literary Prose

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The present study sets out to make a corpus-based, linguistic, descriptive and explanatory investigation of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose (mainly based on three complete English versions of the eighteenth-century Chinese 120-chapter novel Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦, literally translated as Red Chamber Dream) (to be abbreviated as HLM hereinafter). The study chooses to follow Lees (1963) in defining English nominalization as a nominalized transform of a finite verbal form and focus on three categories of the NOM as a representative of the process of nominalization (i.e. Gerundive NOM, Derived NOM, and Zero-derived NOM). This study regards nominalization as one of the manifestations of implicitation in translation.

1.1 Research rationale

Since the 1990s, translation scholars have embarked on using techniques and tools of corpus linguistics to investigate translation, thus gradually ushering translation studies into a corpus-based era. One of the most prominent contributions corpus-based translation studies has made so far is the research of what Vanderauwera (1985) initially identified as ‘translation universals’. Translation universals are linguistic ‘features which typically occur in translated text[s] rather than original utterances and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic systems’ (Baker 1993: 243). As a potential candidate for the status of translation universal, explicitation is claimed as ‘one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena in translation studies’ (Perego ← 1 | 2 → 2003: 68; Gumul 2006: 171). It is defined as ‘a stylistic technique which consists of making explicit in the target language what remains implicit in the source language’ (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995: 342). However, the international body of literature on explicitation far outweighs that on implicitation. As Klaudy and Karoly (2005: 13) pointed out, ‘[i]mplicitation is treated as a stepbrother of explicitation: it is generally mentioned merely incidentally’.