基于语料库的翻译语言分析——以“so…that”的汉语对应结构为例

Parallel Corpora-based Analysis of Translationese-The English "so...that" Structure and Its Chinese Equivalents in Focus

本文运用英汉语平行语料库,对so…that结构和它的汉语对应结构进行描述和分析。统计分析结果显示:1)so…that的主要对应形式不是“如此…以致”及类似的“前后对应”式结构.而是零对应;2)so…that在汉语译文中有多种对应形式,而汉语原文中没有固定的结构与so…that对应:3)在翻译中,非文学文本比文学文本更倾向于结构上的对应。

One of the major developments in linguistic research has arisen due to the possibility of analyzing vast amounts of text through computerized tools, particularly through retrieval and concordancing programs. This paper describes and analyses the English 'so...that' structure and its equivalents in Chinese, based on the Chinese-English Parallel Corpora created by the China National Research Center for Foreign Language Education. The corpora for this study consist of four subcorpora, an English-Chinese Literature Corpus, a Chinese-English Literature Corpus, an English-Chinese Non-literature Corpus and a Chinese-English Non-literature Corpus, which contain 1.7, 1.5, 1.3,and 1.0 million words / characters respectively. The basic investigation procedure for querying these parallel corpora consisted in producing concordance lines, the Key Word In Context (KWIC) concordance, for the string of words so...that. In concordancing, we used the search format string 'so+20+that' (with a span of 20 words) as the key word. The concordances retrieved were aligned sentences for reclassification and analysis. This study confirms the validity of the common techniques employed in rendering the 'so ...that' structure. However, the analysis of the concordance shows that the corresponding renderings in Chinese are much more than was thought. In general, the analysis yields three findings: (1) The most commonly employed equivalent of the 'so...that' structure in Chinese translation is not the ruci...yizhi pattern and its variants, but rather the 0-correspondent structure. (2) According to the statistics, as far as the translation of 'so...that' is concerned, non-literary translation in Chinese lays more stress on structural correspondence. (3) There is no fixed or consistent equivalent for 'so...that' in Chinese. Some of the structural equivalents employed are contingent, and the translated text reflects the structure of the original. The findings support our claim that translation can add new structures to the syntactic repertoire of the source language, exert new constraints on the existing syntactic structure, or increase the frequency of rarely used structures.