This study aims to investigate the translation procedures adopted for the Englishudtranslation of Chinese empty words. To begin with, the methods which translatorsudadopt to tackle empty words are identified by examining examples in a specially-constructedudparallel corpus, which includes Chinese literary texts and their Englishudtranslations. Eventually, eight translation procedures (1) Match; 2) Paraphrase; 3)udShared Match; 4) Implicitation; 5) Amplification; 6) Grammatical Conveyance; 7)udBorrowing; 8) Omission) and one non-procedure (Mismatch) are identified. It is notedudthat Grammatical Conveyance is a procedure which could be deemed as a newly-identifiedudmethod. As a further step, the proportion of these procedures/non-procedureudis investigated to identify the most-/least-adopted ones (Match and Amplificationudrespectively) and to discuss category-specific ones (Shared Match and Borrowing). Inudaddition to identifying the procedures for translating Chinese empty words intoudEnglish, this research also makes contributions in the following two aspects. Firstly,udthis study, to my knowledge, is the first research which examines all Chinese emptyudwords at a time to identify the ways translators tackle them. Secondly, it is knownudfrom the results that difficult-to-tackle empty words are found in the categories ofudAdverb and Particle. In other words, not all empty words are difficult to translate asudformer scholars have described.
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