Chinese Empty Words and the Challenges in Translating Them to English

As an indispensable component in the Chinese language, empty words are said to be of elusive meaning. To grasp the nature of these words, this article, based on former theorists' viewpoints, endeavours to explore the development of the Chinese writing system and the characteristics of empty words. Eventually, it is understood that Chinese empty words convey ambiguous ideas and can only constitute meaningful sentences when collocating solid words. Regarding the difficulties in translating these words, it is observed that the majority of empty words can be translated without much difficulty as long as context is provided for disambiguation, and only some adverbs and particles pose as challenges to translators. The reason why these words are hard to deal with is twofold: 1) they are simply tone reinforcers that do not have much meaning; 2) they are linguistic characteristics that do not exist in English language. From the research examples, it is noted that translators tend to either omit such words in translation or address them by paraphrase or the use of punctuation marks.

關鍵字

empty words ； solid words ； context

並列摘要

虛詞為漢語不可或缺的一部分，而其詞義時而抽象、難以捉摸，本文以前人之研究為基礎，探討漢語虛詞之本質與特徵，從而研究虛詞之翻譯有何困難之處。分析結果顯示，虛詞本身含義不甚具體，通常須與實詞搭配理解方能得其意。此外，在翻譯難處方面，研究結果發現，其實大多數虛詞在與上下文搭配閱讀下並不難處理，只有部分副詞及質詞棘手，而究其原因有二：〈一〉該虛詞不具具體意思，僅用於增強語氣，〈二〉該虛詞所具備的語言特性不見於英文之中。面對這些虛詞，譯者處理方式有三：〈一〉省略、〈二〉換句話說及〈三〉以標點符號傳達該虛詞含意。

並列關鍵字

虛詞；實詞；上下文

國際替代計量

Chinese Empty Words and the Challenges in Translating Them to English

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