Abstract
This study aims to analyse the possible translation tendencies of the structure “bu (mei) + verb” from Chinese to Portuguese. In modern Chinese, the two negative adverbs “bu” and “mei” have a very close relationship with the aspect of postponed verbs, that is, as Chinese verbs are not conjugated, these two negative adverbs associate the verbs to different aspects (the adverb “bu” links the postponed verb to the imperfect aspect, and the adverb “mei”, to the perfect aspect). To verify whether the Portuguese translations of such adverbs also obey this relationship, we use a parallel Chinese-Portuguese corpus, whose design is based on a work by Mo Yan, Chinese writer, and its Portuguese translation by Amilton Reis. By examining the extracted bilingual examples, we sought to analyse and discuss the possible tendencies in the translation of the structure “bu (mei) + verb” into Portuguese, in the hope of helping translators in training to understand and master the translation tendencies of this structure.
Keywords
Negative adverb “bu”; Negative adverb “mei”; Translation; Parallel corpus; Chinese