A study on the application of paraphrase strategy in the translation from chinese to english

Abstract

Paraphrase as a kind of translation strategy is often used in translation between two languages, it is also one of the ways to solve translation problems, especially the problem that two languages are not equal at word level. In this paper, the author’s material is ‘Farewell: Departing for “Downunder” ’from Six chapters from my life “downunder”, which is written by Yang Jiang. The objective is Howard Goldblatt’s English translation. The theoretical basis is Mona Baker’s explanation of paraphrase from the perspective of linguistics in her book In Other Words-A coursebook on translation. The paper only studies words and expressions, it explores the reasons to cause unequal problems at word level between English and Chinese, and it mainly studies the application of paraphrase strategy from 3 aspects with quantitative and qualitative approaches: firstly, according to Mona Baker’ s definition about paraphrase strategy in the book of In Other Words, paraphrase strategy can be divided into “Translation by paraphrase using a related word” and “Translation by paraphrase using unrelated words”, on the basis of this division, the paper counts the number of the two paraphrase strategies used by Howard Goldblatt. Then, the paper contrasts and analyzes the statistical results. At last, the author explores the reasons paraphrase strategy. And the study can improve translation.