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

• Published in: Learning Technologies and Systems Vol. 12511; pp. 420 - 429
• Main Authors: Wang, Tiantian, Ge, Shili
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Corpus; Semantic prosody; Translation studies
• ISBN: 303066905X; 9783030669058
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-66906-5_40

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.