Conclusion 15
Acknowledgment 16
Bibliography 17
Appendix A Test Sentences 19
1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Chinese are often beset by the translation of negation in Chinese-English translation. Different modes of thought influence the expression of languages, so English can be translated properly based on the ways and habits of English. Compared with Chinese,negation of English is more agile and various in structures and forms.
Many words and sentence structures in English have no obvious negative affixes or negative words , however, their meanings are negative. Such implicit negations have permeated through the various forms and play an important role in negative expressions in English (Wu & Yang, 2001) .The Chinese vocabulary and grammar structures are different from that in English, so to learn about the real meaning of the sentences when translating is very important for students. The negative words in Chinese are fewer than English, so it is difficult to find an equivalent translation sometimes. The next we can do is to paraphrase it with its original meaning reserved.
Both Chinese and English are plentiful in rhetoric. Rhetoric always obeys the restriction of the culture environment, and it cannot be free from the influence of national culture. The different aesthetic standard may also make it difficult to give enough consideration to both meanings and forms in Chinese-English translation, so the forms always be abandoned when conflict occurs (Chen, 2010) . Therefore, it becomes necessary to learn about the custom and culture of English.
1.2 Purpose of the Study
This paper is trying to explore the use of negative words in Chinese-English translation. In recent years, the study of the classification of negation and negative words has achieved great success, but the specific usage of negatives words has not given enough attention. In order to provide some information and reference for the English learners in foreign languages’ study, this paper chiefly focuses on the use of negative words in negative sentences in English-Chinese translation.
The study of the negation in Chinese-English translation will help the undergraduates classify and pick appropriate negative words in translation and help Chinese students know the original English text well and grasp the skills of translation. This paper attempts to investigate how the knowledge of grammar and culture influence the negation translation .
1.3 Research Questions
Since the aim of this thesis is to study the use of negative words in Chinese-English translation, the research questions proposed are as follows :
(1) How do grammar and culture acquisition influence the Chinese-English translation?
(2) Why are the error points so similar between English majors and non-English majors?
1.4 Organization
Firstly,This paper presents the background and the purpose of this study. When it comes to translation,the most important parts are culture and grammar learning. The second part briefly reviews the former researches on negation and negative words and analyzes negation from different perspectives. The third part introduces the subjects ,data information and instruments of the research methodology. The forth part are results and discussion ,which is the main body of the study. In this part,some typical examples will be used to discuss and analyze.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Definition of key Terms
According to Wen Yongchao (2013) , the negative meaning can be delivered by some verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and idioms instead of traditional “not”, “no”, “none” and the negative affix un_, im_, dis_in_and etc.
Transferred negation was first proposed by R.Quirk (1972) , who thought the transferred negation in general is to transfer the negative words “not”from its subordinate clause to the main clause. 否定句英汉互译中的否定词使用研究(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_20122.html