A Corpus-based Study on Adverbs of Degree in C-E Translation of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China

Abstract

Adverbs play an important role in the language on account of their variety in usage, flexibility in position, and diversity of meanings in different contexts. Considering the inherent distinctions between Chinese and English, the translation of adverbs is critical to representing the idea clearly and smoothly. The paper intends to investigate the adverbial translation of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China through the corpus-based methods, examining normalization in translating Chinese adverbs of degree. Using corpus software and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator, the author conducts a research on adverbs of degree in both the comparable corpus and parallel corpus. As a result, the paper finds that weakening instead of normalization is the tendency in translation of adverbs of degree, whether from the perspective of the comparable corpus or the parallel corpus. The translated texts of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China turn out to have fewer adverbs of degree in terms of frequency, compared to the original English corpus. And it can be seen that adverbs of degree are omitted or expressed in another way rather than directly translated from Chinese to English. Motivations are found to be semantic degradation of adverbs of degree, ambiguity of meaning of adverbs of degree, and habitual way of expression. Hopefully, the study will shed some light on the further corpus-based research or translation of political texts in the future.