The definition of wording According to Illustrated Oxford Dictionary(1999:961), wording refers to: 1. a form of words used; 2. the way in which something is expressed. In this section, by referring to the above two definitions, we prefer to define wording as: 1. selected words in texts; 2. exact choice and meaning of words used in texts.

Why is wording in translation chosen as the focus of study here? Just as Halliday points out, “a text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one… meanings are realized through wordings; and without a theory of wordings…there is no way of making explicit one’s interpretation of the meaning of a text” (2000: 43). So in translation of a sentence, paragraph, or text, comprehension of words always goes as the first step. Translators abandon literal translation only when there are special reasons to do so. Mona Baker holds the same opinion, “ Text is a meaning unit, not a form unit, but meaning is realized through form and without understanding the meanings of individual forms one cannot interpret the meaning of the text as a whole” (1992, 2000: 6). The second reason is that, as Peter Newmark in A Textbook of Translation states, “the chief difficulties in translating are lexical, not grammatical”(1988: 32), and indeed, most of the mistakes made in translation are lexical rather than grammatical. To achieve adequate comprehension of wording in the SLT and reproduce it in the TLT, the theory of word meaning should first be looked into. Word meaning is the most fluid, while textual meaning is the most definite.

Seven types of meaning listed by Leech Conceptual meaning or senseLogical, cognitive, or denotative content Associative meaningConnotative meaningWhat is communicated by virtue of what language refers to Social meaningWhat is communicated of the social circumstances of language use Affective meaningWhat is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer. Reflected meaningWhat is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression. Collocative meaningWhat is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word. Thematic meaningWhat is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

Disparities between languages What translators are concerned with is largely the difference of meaning aspect of the word between English and Chinese. Baker (1992, 2000: 21-26) lists eleven kinds of disparities between word-meanings among languages: 1. cultural specific concepts; 2. the source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language; 3. the source-language word is semantically complex; 4. the source and target language make different distinctions in meaning; 5. the target language lacks a super-ordinate; 6. the target language lacks a specific term (hyponym); 7. difference in physical or interpersonal perspective; 8. differences in expressive meaning; 9. differences in form; 10. differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms; 11. the use of loan words in the source text.

A contrastive study of Chinese and English at the word level (1) 1. Partial correspondence. The meaning of a word in Chinese may be narrower or wider than its corresponding word in English. This covers what Baker lists as 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. English kinship words make no difference between paternal and maternal side, while Chinese kinship terms pay great attention to that. E.g. aunt 姑姑，姨妈，舅妈，伯母，婶子 等. Now compare such words as: exclaim 大声说 ; blurt 脱口而出 ; stammer 吞吞吐吐地说 ; whisper 悄声说 ; ejaculate 突然说 ; number 含糊地说. Chinese has the general word “ 说 ”, but no specific words denoting all these different kinds of “ 说 ”. English has various kinds of “say”, each should be replaced by a Chinese word plus a pre-modifier.

A contrastive study of Chinese and English at the word level (2) No corresponding words can be found between English and Chinese. This equals what Baker lists as 1, 2 and 3.  English and Chinese are both languages rich in culture. Many words are culture-loaded, e.g. with rich cultural background. The cultural meaning of English words, according to He Shanfen (2002: ), mainly comes from their religion, myth, literary works, some historical events, customs, geographical facts, life style, ideology, etc. These are para-lingual and extra-lingual context bound.  Also, there are some new terms created in English which have not yet found any corresponding words in Chinese, such as “mascon” (mass concentration: 月球表层下高密度的物质聚积 ) and beddo （一种多用途的床 ).

A contrastive study of Chinese and English at the word level (3) Polysemous words in English, each sense matching a corresponding word in Chinese. This phenomenon is very common and we can come across it wherever translation takes place and no illustration is needed. One thing we have to note is that since most words are polysemous and a single word just provides a range of possibilities for one to choose, then why does one choose the particular meaning of a particular word in the SL text, and how can the translator reproduce it? The key to these questions is the contexts.