Light Verbs in Translated Chinese

  • Guangrong Dai
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the New Frontiers in Translation Studies book series (NFTS)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the light verbs, which related to nominalization, and their hybridity features in translated Chinese, using parallel and comparable corpora as an evidence base. It first introduces the difference between Chinese and English in light verbs, then the different frequencies in translated and native Chinese. It focuses on the different usage of light verbs in translated and native Chinese. The findings include: (1) The light verb ‘jìnxíng’(进行 proceed) used more frequently in translated Chinese than that in original Chinese. (2) Most of the collocation categories of ‘jìnxíng’ in translated original Chinese are the same, such as gerund, adjective, distinguishing words etc., which are in accordance with the requirements of modern written Chinese discussed by Zhu (1985), Lü (1999) and Diao (2004). This is the normalization effect in translation and the translated Chinese is influenced by the norm of the target original Chinese. (3) The usages and collocations of ‘jìnxíng’ also display the different features in translated Chinese: it can collocate with the aspect markers of ‘zhe’(着 which means the progressing of an action or event) and ‘guo’(过 which means the completeness of an action or event) with high frequencies and Z-scores. The usages and collocations violate the grammatical rules pointed out by Lü (1999) and Zhu (1985), etc. The collocations such as ‘English character strings’ and ‘transcription of geographic names’ can be the effect of ‘source language shining through’ in translation process. (4) The increasing frequencies of ‘jìnxíng’ both in translated and original Chinese within diachronic comparable corpus show the tendency of abstraction and nominalization of the light verb constructions. (5) Four categories equivalents of ‘jìnxíng’ in English make the light verb use widely in translated Chinese than that in the original Chinese. The article also suggests the translating methods for the light verb ‘jìnxíng’ with the help of parallel corpus data.

Keywords

Noun Phrase Source Language Parallel Corpus Grammatical Rule Lexical Meaning 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Guangrong Dai
    • 1
  1. 1.School of HumanitiesFujian University of TechnologyFuzhouChina

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