A Study of English Translation of Chinese Ceramic Cultural terms: A corpus-based approach

Abstract

This article employed self-building corpus to explore the strategies and methods of translating Chinese ceramic cultural terms. Firstly, the translator rendered the Chinese ceramic terms preferably into their literal or conceptual equivalents in English, during which the methods of literal translation, transliteration and free translation were utilized. However, the English translations of Chinese ceramic terms were also diversified and suffered from deviations from source-target equivalence for both intralinguistic and interlinguistic reasons. The intralinguistic reasons include polysemy of Chinese Ceramic terms and terminological variations in Chinese ceramic texts, and the interlinguistic reasons include different cohesive patterns between English and Chinese and determinologization as result of the adaptation of the target audience from experts for the source text to laymen for its English translation. These intralinguistic and interlinguistic reasons accounts for the methods adopted by the translator in English translation of Chinese ceramic terms including the zero translations of Chinese ceramic terms and explanations of Chinese ceramic terms with general language in English.