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

Three Versions of "Dream of the Red Chamber</I>

by Yu Hou (Author)
©2015 Monographs XII, 218 Pages

Summary

This corpus-based study investigates the use of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose through the analysis of three English versions of the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber).
Previous studies have explored the relevance of the cultural and linguistic positioning of different translators, but thus far no corpus-based study of nominalization has been undertaken in relation to translator style. This book uses quantitative and qualitative analyses of the nominalized transform of finite verbal forms in three Chinese-to-English translations to distinguish between translator styles, concluding that nominalization is a key identifier in translations.
This book provides a comprehensive picture of the use of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose and, more generally, encourages further study into nominalization in translation.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • List of figures
  • List of tables
  • List of abbreviations
  • Chapter 1: Introduction
  • Chapter 2: Explicitation/implicitation in translation
  • Chapter 3: Nominalization: Literature review
  • Chapter 4: Methodology
  • Chapter 5: NOMs in three English versions of Hong Lou Meng
  • Chapter 6: Findings and discussion
  • Chapter 7: NOMs in English translations of Chinese literary prose
  • Chapter 8: Conclusions
  • References
  • Index
  • Series index

Figures

Tables

Abbreviations

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’.

Details

Pages
XII, 218
Year
2015
ISBN (PDF)
9783035306521
ISBN (ePUB)
9783035397673
ISBN (MOBI)
9783035397666
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034318150
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0353-0652-1
Language
English
Publication date
2014 (November)
Keywords
linguistic positioning key identifier translator style
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2014. XII, 218 pp., 19 tables, 10 fig.

Biographical notes

Yu Hou (Author)

Yu Hou is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Yanshan University, China. He obtained his PhD in translation studies from Macquarie University, Australia in 2011 with a joint scholarship from the China Scholarship Council and Macquarie University.

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237 pages