语料库语言学视角下的政治文献英译词汇特征研究--以2018-2020年《政府工作报告》和《国情咨文》为例

Research on Lexical Features of English Translation of Political Documents from the Perspective of Corpus Linguistics:Taking as Examples Report on the Work of the Government and State of the Union Address from 2018 to 2020

政治文献的英译是我国外宣翻译的重要组成部分,对于中国构建对外话语体系起着至关重要的作用。借助语料库对语言样本进行研究是信息技术与翻译研究进一步融合的必然趋势,有助于为相关研究提供更客观的研究基础。因此,本文选取了2018年至2020年的中国《政府工作报告》英译文以及同期的美国《国情咨文》自建研究语料库,辅以Antconc3.5.8语料库检索软件,对类符形符比、词汇密度、名词化、高频词四个方面的词汇特征进行比较和分析。研究发现:与英语为母语的政治文献相比,英语译文在词汇的处理方面名词化现象比较突出,存在大量的动词连用现象;倾向于使用中度意愿的情态动词;第一人称复数的使用频率较高;阅读难度有所降低,可读性不断增强;其文本特征总体呈现正式语体的文本类型特点。因此,本文有利于拓展我国政治文献英译研究的范式,也对其他相关领域研究起到一定的促进作用。

The English translation of political documents is an important part of China's international publicity translation and thus plays a vital role in the construction of China’s foreign discourse system.Using corpus to study language samples is also the inevitable trend of the further integration of information technology and translation studies,which can provide a more objective research basis.Therefore,this paper selects the English translation of Report on the Work of the Government from 2018 to 2020 and State of the Union Address of the United States at the same time as the self-built corpus,using Antconc3.5.8 corpus retrieval software to compare and analyze the lexical features in four aspects,including type/token ratio,lexical density,nominalization and high-frequency words.The results show that compared with original English political documents,in lexical terms,the English translation features more frequent use of nominalization,verbs in series,modal verbs with moderate intention,and the first-person complex.It has become easier to read and more readable.On the whole,its text features show the characteristics of formal texts.This paper is conducive to the further development of the paradigm of Chinese political document translation,and also plays a certain role in promoting the research in other related fields.