Author(s)

Qian Liu

Corresponding Author

Qian Liu

Abstract

Instrument is an object with which the agent does something, and a means by which the agent attains the end. Its typical syntactic performance is playing the adverbial and marked with “yong” in Chinese and with “with” in English. This is not the only instance. By comparing and analyzing various Chinese-English translations of the instrument case collected from Wolf Totem and its English version, this study categorizes three degrees of reproduction according to the changes in their semantic meaning, syntactic structure and pragmatic function and concludes tendencies and motivations of these translations.

Keywords

Instrument Case; Interface Study; Chinese-English Translation; Reproduction