关键词: 翻译汉语; 介词; 语料库; 使用特征

Abstract:

The corpus-based studies have shown that translated Chinese texts use more function words, such as conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns. By now, research concerning the overuse of prepositions has been done mainly focusing on a few specific prepositions, such as “bei” and “ba”, and as the corpus of specific genre has been used in each study, sometimes contradictory findings are produced. Therefore, a survey on the general features of prepositions in translated Chinese is conducted in this paper, based on a comparison between LCMC (The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese) and ZCTC (The ZJU Corpus of Translational Chinese), two comprehensive corpora covering different genres. It is found that the overuse of prepositions is significant in all the four genres (press, general prose, learned, fiction) in translated Chinese. Further explorations show that prepositions of time and place and those of content and object are much more frequently used, while prepositions of means and tools are less frequently used; and disyllables tend to be preferred in translated Chinese. These features of prepositions in translated Chinese may result from various factors combined. First, it is interference of English source language. Prepositions are much more frequently used in English than in Chinese and an observation of the English-Chinese parallel corpus indicates that many prepositions in translated Chinese are directly translated from prepositions and sometimes conjunctions or other phrases in the original English. The second factor is the characteristics of Chinese prepositions. In Chinese, prepositions often used at the beginning of a sentence or in the framework ending with a locative or other noun, such as prepositions of time and space and those of content and object, are more likely to be omitted. They are also more likely to be overused in translated Chinese. The third is the development of Chinese language itself. The modern Chinese sentence tends to be longer and more complex, and more prepositions is needed to help make clear the relationship between different parts of a sentence.

Keywords: translated Chinese; prepositions; corpus; features