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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Corpus-Based Semantic Prosody Study of English-Chinese Translation: Taking Trump’s Popular Saying “It Is What It Is” as an Example

Authors : Tiantian Wang, Shili Ge

Published in: Learning Technologies and Systems

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

US President Trump once again uttered a “popular sentence”, “It is what it is”, causing widespread complaints. Although its frequently reporting by major media abroad, Chinese English learners are so unfamiliar with the expression. Besides, the official translation given by the “China Daily” is “情况就是这样”, which is unlikely to be a satisfied translation. To find empirical support for the argument, this paper focused on the frequency, diachronic trend and semantic prosody tendency of it and its official translation in two corpora (COCA and BCC). The research result shows that major differences exist between “It is what it is” and “情况就是这样”. In contrast, “事已至此” and “It is what it is” are more comparable in all dimensions. Thus, “事已至此” is a better version of “It is what it is”. This study regards semantic prosody as an indispensable part of translation, providing new perspectives for corpus-assisted translation studies.

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Metadata
Title
Corpus-Based Semantic Prosody Study of English-Chinese Translation: Taking Trump’s Popular Saying “It Is What It Is” as an Example
Authors
Tiantian Wang
Shili Ge
Copyright Year
2021
Book
Learning Technologies and Systems

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66905-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-66906-5

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66906-5_40

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