An Investigation of Degree of Anglicization of 30 English-Chinese Translation Texts: A Case Study of Linguistic Borrowing

Over the past few decades English-Chinese translation texts have been severely discredited for containing various Anglicized features. Anglicization of translation texts has aroused the general public's concern that Chinese may be contaminated by translation texts. It is therefore of social and academic significance to investigate such a phenomenon. Based on 30 texts and 4 degrees of Anglicization namely very Anglicized, moderately Anglicized, generally fluent and very fluent, this study aims to investigate to what extent English-Chinese translation texts contain English features. This study found the average degree of Anglicization of the 30 texts to be 2.07, meaning the average text is fluent. Of the 30 texts, 5(16.7%) were found to be very Anglicized; 7(23.3%), moderately Anglicized; 12(40%), generally fluent; 6(20%), very fluent. Overall, 18, or 60%, of them were found to be generally fluent or very fluent, i.e., to be completely free from any unwanted borrowed feature. This indeed points to the fact that translators have over the past few years endeavored to turn out satisfactory translation works. Only 12(40%) of the texts were found to be either moderately Anglicized or very Anglicized. The five ”very Anglicized” texts were found to be characterized mostly by overuse of particles and qualifiers, the unnecessary use of certain words, unclear or awkward Chinese phrases or sentences resulting from translators' lack of a solid understanding of the English syntax, or adoption of clumsy and inaccurate word-for-word translations. The very Anglicized texts all needed rewriting to make them readable or fluent.