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

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Learning Technologies and Systems (SETE 2020, ICWL 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12511))

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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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510420, China

    Tiantian Wang

  2. Laboratory of Language and Artificial Intelligence, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510420, China

    Shili Ge

Authors
  1. Tiantian Wang
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  2. Shili Ge
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shili Ge .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, Ningbo, China

    Chaoyi Pang

  2. College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yunjun Gao

  3. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Guanliang Chen

  4. Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, University of Craiova, Craiova, Romania

    Elvira Popescu

  5. Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Lu Chen

  6. School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

    Tianyong Hao

  7. Zhejiang University, Ningbo, China

    Bailing Zhang

  8. Universidad Internacional De La Rioja, Logroño, Spain

    Silvia Margarita Baldiris Navarro

  9. Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Qing Li

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Wang, T., Ge, S. (2021). Corpus-Based Semantic Prosody Study of English-Chinese Translation: Taking Trump’s Popular Saying “It Is What It Is” as an Example. In: Pang, C., et al. Learning Technologies and Systems. SETE ICWL 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12511. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66906-5_40

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

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66905-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66906-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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