Google-Translate-Combined Emotion Analysis in Translating Literary Works: Comparison of Two Chinese Versions of David Copperfield

Abstract

Emotion, the root of literature, can never be ignored as a key factor in literature translation, yet studies on it are still rare till now. Reasons may vary, among which one might be that emotions of different languages seem impossible to compare for the different degrees or standards of measuring them in different cultures. This study intends to investigate the possibility of emotion transfer in translations. Specifically, it examines to what extent and how emotions in the original can be transferred into the translations, combining the machine translation, by comparing two Chinese versions of David Copperfield, as well as the machine translation of the two Chinese versions with the original. The results indicate that emotions can flow from the source to the target language, and their representations are closely related to the translators’ desire to have their versions be adequate to the source or acceptable to the target culture.

Keywords

Emotional analysis / Google Translate / adequacy / acceptability / translational unit

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