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A Multidimensional Analysis of the Discourse Features of the English Translation of Heavy Wings

Author(s)

Jingxiao Zhao, Xiuwen Li*

Affiliation(s)

Institute of Foreign Languages, Changchun University of Technology, Beiyuanda Street, Fenjin Town, Changchun, Jilin, China *Corresponding Author.

Abstract

Ideology and translation go hand in hand. Translation is a rewriting of the source text, reflecting the ideology and poetics of a particular society. This paper establishes a Chinese-English parallel corpus based on two English translations of Heavy Wings, which takes ideology as the object of study, using multidimensional analysis to examine register differences and to compare the represented features in ideological markers between the two translations in the four dimensions, namely nominalization, transitivity, modality and coherence. Based on system functional linguistics, this paper examines the relationship between ideological markers and the process of the event, the participants and the environment. It was found that: (1) There is a great significance in register of two translations, with 31 out of 67 lexico-grammatical features. Gladys Yang’s translation shows a higher degree of abstract information and explicit; (2) Gladys Yang’s translation mainly focus on the reform process and participants, deliberately distancing the two parties from each other, while Goldblatt’s translation tends to attribute the factional conflicts in the reform to various environmental components, opening up more evaluation space for the textual content; (3) The differences in the use of linguistic and ideological markers are affected by both intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, namely source text factors, social context, ideology, translator subjectivity, etc.

Keywords

Heavy Wings; Multidimensional Analysis; Ideological Markers; Corpus

References

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