This study aims to investigate the translation procedures adopted for the English
translation of Chinese empty words. To begin with, the methods which translators
adopt to tackle empty words are identified by examining examples in a specially-constructed
parallel corpus, which includes Chinese literary texts and their English
translations. Eventually, eight translation procedures (1) Match; 2) Paraphrase; 3)
Shared Match; 4) Implicitation; 5) Amplification; 6) Grammatical Conveyance; 7)
Borrowing; 8) Omission) and one non-procedure (Mismatch) are identified. It is noted
that Grammatical Conveyance is a procedure which could be deemed as a newly-identified
method. As a further step, the proportion of these procedures/non-procedure
is investigated to identify the most-/least-adopted ones (Match and Amplification
respectively) and to discuss category-specific ones (Shared Match and Borrowing). In
addition to identifying the procedures for translating Chinese empty words into
English, this research also makes contributions in the following two aspects. Firstly,
this study, to my knowledge, is the first research which examines all Chinese empty
words at a time to identify the ways translators tackle them. Secondly, it is known
from the results that difficult-to-tackle empty words are found in the categories of
Adverb and Particle. In other words, not all empty words are difficult to translate as
former scholars have described.