Revisiting Semantic Prosody from the Perspective of English-Chinese Translation

Semantic prosody is a pivotal concept in the field of corpus linguistics, but the academic community has not reached a consensus on its properties and the method of analysis. Translation provides a unique cross-linguistic contrastive perspective for semantic prosody research in both theory and application. Based on corpus data, this study examines the semantic prosody of the English phrase “It HAPPEN that” from an English-Chinese translation perspective. The results show that as a dynamic concept, semantic prosody could be only captured in specific language use contexts. In translation, even the same linguistic expression may exhibit different semantic prosodies in various contexts, and translators should understand the semantic prosody in the original text, and select appropriate translation strategies to ensure the accurate transmission of semantic prosody, thereby enhancing the quality of the translation. Furthermore, due to the differences between English and Chinese, it is challenging to find English-Chinese equivalent expressions with identical semantic prosody. The study also proposes the notion of “semantic prosody potentials”. The findings provide practical and theoretical implications for translation teaching and practice.