汉语译文的成语特征研究:翻译共性假设再探

Idioms and idiomaticity in translational Chinese:Translation Universals hypotheses revisited

本文利用汉语译文语料库(ZCTC)与汉语母语语料库(LCMC)对英汉翻译中汉语译文的成语特征进行研究,旨在检验Baker翻译共性假设在汉语译文中的适用性,并探讨该理论的可改进之处。基于肖忠华、戴光荣(2010)对于汉语译文中习语及词簇的研究,本文将两语料库中已标注的习语与词簇,对照《新华成语词典》进一步人工筛选出成语,从宏观和微观两个角度入手,对汉语译入语中的成语在形符与类符总量、词性分布、高频词、词义种类、词形结构等方面的特征进行研究。数据表明,与母语文本相比,汉语译文中的成语形符总量较少、但类符更为丰富、高频词与低频词使用呈现两极分化的趋势;成语意义多显化,以字面义为主;词形结构固定,缺少变换。由此可见,翻译共性理论中的显化、集中化及整齐化假设适用于汉语译入语,而简化假设似由'两极分化'解释更为妥帖。

The present study intends to explore the idiomatic properties of idioms in translated Chinese texts(i.e.ZCTC)to verify and revisit Baker’s Translation Universals hypotheses from the perspective of Chinese.As a follow-up study of Xiao and Dai(2010)on word clusters in translated Chinese,the present paper manually filtered the annotated word clusters in the two corpora into idioms based on Xinhua Chengyu Cidian(2002)dictionary and examined the total counts of token,type,part-of-speech distribution,high-frequency idioms as well as semantic and structural properties of idioms in the two corpora.It is observed that compared with their native counterparts(i.e.as in LCMC),idioms in translated Chinese are less in total amount,more diversified in type and exhibit a polarisation of high-frequency and low-frequency idioms.Their meaning tends to be more literal and explicit and their structure demonstrates more fixedness,revealing translators’prudence in conforming to the standard norms of the target language.These results reconfirm the hypothesis of explicitation,standardisation and leveling out in the Translation Universals theory,yet leaving the simplification hypothesis largely unmatched with Chinese.Thus,the present paper revises this simplification hypothesis in the TUs theory to a polarisation hypothesis,hoping to better account for the perplexing phenomenon in idiomatic usage in translated Chinese.