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- Title
Translating Motion Events from English into Chinese: An Examination of Literary Works.
- Authors
Wang, Vincent X.
- Abstract
The paper aims to study how motion events are narrated in two English novels and their Chinese translations. Typologically, English is a satellite-framed language, while Chinese has been found to pattern with neither satellite-framed languages nor verb-framed languages. Some researchers have proposed that Chinese belongs to a third language type - equipollently-framed languages (Slobin 2004; Chen & Guo 2009). This study investigates excerpts from two classic English novels and their Chinese translations. The results show that the Chinese translations not only rely on manner-of-motion verbs even more heavily than do the English originals, but also exhibit as diverse a range of manner-of-motion verbs as were used in the English originals. In addition, path information expressed by verb particles and prepositions in English is largely retained through the use of V2 and V3 in the serial verb construction in Chinese. The results reveal important typological similarities between Chinese and English, lending support to Talmy's (2009) contention that Chinese is an S-language.
- Subjects
CHINESE language; ENGLISH language -- Translating into Chinese; LINGUISTIC typology; VERBS
- Publication
Approaches to Translation Studies, 2015, Vol 42, p115
- ISSN
0169-0523
- Publication type
Article