A Corpus-based Study of Normalization in Chinese Translations of Shakespeare's Plays

Based on English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare's Plays and Corpus of Modern Chinese Plays, this paper gives an analysis of normalization in Chinese translations of Shakespeare's plays.Intra-and inter-language comparisons reveal that all three Chinese versions present a tendency of normalization with regard to hapaxes, high-frequency words, four-character structures, and creative collocations of body-part terms.This tendency is mainly caused by two factors: the characteristics of play translations and the translator's attention to target language readers.