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Chapter One Introduction

Since Mona Baker (1993) put forward the use of corpora in describing andanalyzing the translation phenomena, corpus-based translation studies, which is a newresearch field, came into being. The field aims at investigating the features oftranslational languages. A large number of translation corpora and interpretingcorpora have been built and a lot of academic achievements have been achieved incorpus-based translation studies. The corpus-based translation studies contain severalresearch fields, among which the translation universals are the most widely studied.The three hypotheses of translation universals which have been studied the most aresimplification, explicitation and normalization.

1.1 Research Background
The history of corpus-based translation studies is relatively short, but this fieldhas developed rapidly. The establishment symbol of the research paradigm ofcorpus-based translation studies is considered to be the published paper “CorpusLinguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications” written by MonaBaker in 1993 (Wu Ang, Huang Libo, 2006:297). In recent years, a lot ofcorpus-based translation studies have mushroomed, and the related translationresearch approaches have also been widely acknowledged in the research field. Acorpus does not only provide us with authentic language materials for the researcheson translation studies, but also change the translation study approaches so that theresearches will be convincing and objective. Therefore, the corpus-based researchapproach has become an effective way to do research in the field of translation studies.By using this approach, the needed data are provided for the quantitative study incertain aspects for corpus-based translation studies. The corpus-based approach willmake the research results empirical and scientific.Among all the achievements in corpus-based translation studies, Mona Baker suggested that there were “typical features in translational texts instead oforiginal ones which are not results of interference of specific language systems”.Baker (1993: 243-245) firstly put forward the translation universals hypothesis basedon the corpus, including six aspects: (i)A marked rise in the level of explicitnesscompared to specific source texts and to original texts in general; (ii) A tendencytowards disambiguation and simplification; (iii) A strong pReference for conventional grammaticality ; (iv) A tendency to avoid repetitions which occur in source texts,either by omitting them or rewording them;(v) A general tendency to exaggeratefeatures of the target language; (vi) Point (v) above notwithstanding, it has beenshown that the process of mediation often results in a specific type of distribution ofcertain features in translated texts vis-à-vis source texts and original texts in the targetlanguage. In the process of verification and interpretation of the hypothesis, thetranslation universals of Baker s have been summed up as three categories, namelysimplification, explicitation and normalization.
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1.2 Objectives of the Study
Simplification, as one of the translation universals, has been discussed widelyamong researchers. Some research findings support this hypothesis. Some oppose it.Therefore, simplification hypothesis still remains controversial. Before the hypothesiscan be widely accepted, its validity must be tested. Many researchers have tested thehypothe