The Translation of the Function Word “Jiu” in Chinese-.doc

the translation of the function word “jiu” in chinese1. introduction1.1 function wordin english, function word is a “term for linguistic elements which carry primarily grammatical, rather than lexical, meaning and which fulfill mainly syntactic and structural function.” “function words include articles, pronounce, prepositions, and conjunction” (hadumod, 2000: 175). in the dictionary oxford concise dictionary of linguistics, matthews (2001:140) defines the function word as “one with grammatical meaning as opposed to lexical meaning: e. g. the and of are function words (or grammatical words or form words) in the top of everest”. while in chinese, “the function word is one void of lexical meaning. it cannot be used independently to answer a question but can aid lexical words to form a sentence.” “the function word includes adverb, preposition, conjunction, particle, and interjection” (jia shuanghu, 1983: 2). function word can only be attached to lexical words or sentences, denoting the grammatical relationship between lexical words, the emotion and tone of the speaker rather than articles, movement, or quantity, and cannot be used independently as an element in a sentence (wang jinzheng et al. 1984: 372).based on the definitions above, one thing the author wants to point out is that in chinese, the adverb is considered as the function word while it is not the case in english. this paper tends to take adverb as a function word because the materials about the word “jiu” in source language are written in chinese.1.2 “jiu” in chinesein modern chinese, the word “jiu” is frequently used. with complicated and various grammatical functions, it can be used as an adverb, a preposition, a conjunction, or even a verb. and within each functional range, it can be specifically classified into several types. its high frequency of appearance and diverse grammatical functions have long attracted the attention of many experts, most of whom are chinese, to do some researches on its understanding, semantically or grammatically. here, the author cites the usages of the word “jiu” from a new century chinese-english dictionary (hui yu et al. 2003: 850):according to the dictionary, there are altogether 18 usages of the word “jiu” in four kinds of part of speech, the number and the proportion of which are listed as follows: table 1 number and proportion of “jiu” in four parts of speechadverb verbprepositionconjunctionnumber 7 6 3 2proportion 38.89% 33.33% 16.67% 11.11% 1.3 literature review many researches have been done on chinese “jiu”. these researches provide detailed analysis on and profound insight into the understanding of “jiu” as an adverb, a preposition or a conjunction, but they seldom discuss the word as a function word. as for the translation of “jiu”, there have been so far few researches on it.1.4 aims and significance of the present studythis paper, taking camel xiangzi by lao she and translated by shi xiaojing as a case study and aiming to explore the understanding of “jiu” as a function word and its translations, starts with the classification of the word in terms of its parts of speech, which is based on the explanation in the previous researches and dictionaries of various kinds. then sentences containing “jiu” as a function word and the correspondent translations are picked out in the case study and fall into different 2. understanding of “jiu” as a chinese function wordaccording to table 1, even as a function word, the chinese word “jiu” embodies various grammatical functions. this paper, however, adopts the usages from a new century chinese-english dictionary and therefore tends to classify “jiu” as a function word into three types in terms of part of speech: adverb, preposition and conjunction.2.1 “jiu” as a chinese adverbas can be seen in table 1, the grammatical function of the word “jiu” as an adverb plays a major role in the usage of the word. and even as an adverb, it has 7 different usages. this paper, based on several research documents about the classification of the word “jiu” as an adverb, adopts the one by li xiaoqi (2003) in his book a guide in function words in modern chinese, which classifies the usages into the following five: 2.1.1 “jiu” denoting time2.1.1.1 indication of an upcoming event for performing this function, the word “jiu” is often used together with another two chinese words “要”(will) and “快”(quick) , therefore appearing as “就要”(very soon) and “就快”(in a minute) respectively, or can be used independently to indicate that something will happen in a moment. for example:1 天就快亮了。 it will turn light soon. (wu jingrong. et al. 2000: 829)2 会议就要开始了。 the meeting is about to begin. (hui yu. et al. 2003: 850)3. methodology and resultsin the previous part, the author, focusing on the understanding of the word “jiu” as function word from the angle of part of speech, discusses its usages with relevant examples. and in order to explore the translation of the word, a language corpus was developed to collect the necessary data in this part, which includes the source of the corpus, the method of the data search, the criteria for categorization and the results of the data search.3.1 source of datathe language corpus of this paper consists of original sentences collected from lao shes novel camel xiangzi because his works have been universally regarded as representative ones of authentic beijing mandarin, and the usages of “jiu” as function word can be relatively reflected in them. and the translation of the novel is done by shi xiaojing, a famous translator in china. 3.2 data collectionas the meaning of the word “jiu” sometimes cannot be understood without context, it is very important to explore its translation in sentences where the word is in. all the chinese sentences containing “jiu” and their english translation the paper aims to analyze are picked out manually from the selected book. the author firstly finds out in the original the sentences with “jiu”, and then seeks the translation of these sentences from the rendition by shi xiaojing. in the last step, the translation of the word “jiu”, if any, is marked out in the given sentences. table 2 shows the first three sentences of the results.4. analysis of the translations of “jiu” as a function word in camel xiangziin this part, the author discusses the translations of “jiu” according to the results of the third part of the paper.4.1 translations of “jiu” as an adverbtable 8 translations of jiu” as an adverb and their corresponding percentagescategorysub-categorytranslation numberpercentage timeupcoming soon26 4.44% omission 16 2.73%pastalready 5 0.85% all along 7 1.19% omission 4 0.68%subsequenceas soon as 16 2.73% once 10 1.71% then 29 4.95% and 35 5.97%quantity small only 40 6.83% large omission 18 3.07% scope just 33 5.63% omission 57 9.73% emphasis am/ is/ are 30 5.12% must 82 13.99% relevance if, (then) 116 19.80%(since) so 62 10.58% total 586 100%5. conclusion5.1 thoughts on translations of “jiu” as a function wordas discussed in the paper, the chinese “jiu” embodies many grammatical functions when it is used as a function word. sometimes it performs as an adverb, sometimes a preposition, and sometimes a conjunction. this research, focusing on the understanding and the translation of “jiu” as a function word, explores the word in great detail, takes camel xiangzi as a case study and induces the translation methods of the word by combining its usages and translation, which is rarely seen the relative field. through this paper, readers can have an explicit understanding of the complicated chinese “jiu” as a function word and know some translation skills and principles when translating the word in practice. the following chart can show the progress of translating “jiu” as a function word:step 1 a sentence with “jiu”as a function wordstep 2 figure out the part of speech of “jiu”step 3 make clear the usage of “jiu” in the sentencestep 4 find out an equivalent in english or adopt omission in step 1, readers must make sure that “jiu” is a function word in the sentence. then in step 2, readers should figure out the part of speech of “jiu” in the sentence, an adverb, a preposition or a conjunction. in the following step, step 3, readers should make clear the usage of “jiu” in the sentence. for example, if “jiu” works as a conjunction in the sentence, readers should seek out its usage as a conjunctionindicating assumed concess