Liao, Min-Hsiu

English

ROS: The Research Output Service. Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh

Translation and the creation of a new genre : a corpus-based study of interaction in English and Chinese popular science writings

The aims of this study are to investigate the interactive strategies of the translators in the genre of popular science and the potential influence of translation practice on nontranslated popular science writings. The theoretical framework of interaction in written texts and translations is based on work on text-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and target-oriented and inter~ctional translation studies. The theoretical framework of the relationship between translations and non-translations draws mainly from polysystem theory and other empirical studies. The investigation is based on corpora comprising texts from Scientific American magazine (English and Chinese editions) and Academia Sillica Balanced Corpus of Modem Chinese. This corpus-based methodology is adopted to facilitate the observation of recurrent patterns of Interactive trends in a large body of texts. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are involved. Whereas quantitative analysis points out trends of interaction based on numerical evidence, qualitative analysis focuses on contextualised factors and seeks to explain the interactive phenomena. The textual findings of interactive patterns are then further supported by paratextual evidence. The study finds that the Chinese translators of popular science writings tend to take an active approach in mediating the gap between source text writers and target readers. The translators use more interactive strategies than the source text writers to involve the readers in the texts. Another important finding is that, based on the use of selected interactive features, we suggest that the Chinese popular science writings have been influenced by the interactive strategies used by the'translators; and have begun to show trends of more active writer-reader interaction which are not seen in iraditional popular science writings in Taiwan.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

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Translation and the creation of a new genre : a corpus-based study of interaction in English and Chinese popular science writings

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