Quantitative Analysis And Factor Model Construction Of The Translator’s Subjectivity

Translation practice has a long history,and the discussion on the translator’s subjectivity has always been the focus of scholarly attention.In the past,studies on the translator’s subjectivity were mostly based on theoretical and qualitative analyses,which were difficult to promote due to the lack of substantive and conclusive evidence.The few quantitative studies also tended to produce contradictory results due to the lack of clear definitions and precise control of variables.Therefore,despite the long history of research on the translator’s subjectivity,the relevant theoretical and empirical studies have been rather loose or even disconnected,and no system has been formed.In view of its importance in translation studies and the shortcomings of existing studies,we believe it is necessary to make a more comprehensive and quantitative exploration of the translator’s subjectivity(Chinese to English in literary works in our study)from a new research perspective and methodology.This study started with a new working definition of translator subjectivity,taking into account the concepts of subjectivity in philosophy,language and translation.That is,the factors of the translator’s native language background that the translator incorporates when understanding the source text;some of the translator’s own stylistic features,views and subjective attitudes that the translator incorporates when translating,etc.Then,from this working definition,the translator’s subjectivity is divided into three aspects: the translator’s native language background factor,the translator’s language style factor and the translator’s subjective attitude factor.The subsequent research was divided into two steps: Quantitative analysis,which explored what linguistic indicators reflect the translator’s subjectivity and established indicators for the Model construction step;and Model construction,which involved constructing a quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity,explaining each factor in the model and testing the validity of the model.Finally,the theory of the translator’s subjectivity model was discussed in relation to the cognitive process of translation.The research questions include:(1)From the perspective of quantitative analysis,how does the translator’s subjectivity manifest itself in terms of three factors:the translator’s native background,the translator’s language style and the translator’s subjective attitude?(2)From the perspective of model construction,what factors make up the quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity? Is the factor model of the translator’s subjectivity still valid after the verification test?(3)What are the applications and cognitive implications of the quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity constructed in this study? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the model itself? The main findings of this study may answer these questions.The quantitative analysis of the translator’s subjectivity in this study can be divided into three aspects: the translator’s native cultural background,the translator’s linguistic style and the translator’s subjective attitude,among which the influence of translator’s native language has been a commonly neglected issue in studies related to the translator’s subjectivity.We included translators’ translations from different translation directions in the study(Lin Yutang’s and James Legge’s translations of Zhuangzi and Daode Jing),and supplemented the data with the translators’ original works in English(Lin’s Moment in Peking and Legge’s The Religions of China)to examine the influence of translators’ native language on lexical,syntactic and discoursal complexity indicators.The results of the study revealed that in our cases,the influence of the translator’s native language was mainly reflected in the syntactic complexity indicators;Secondly,from the perspective of language style,this study still selected different translators’ translations of the same source text for analysis,and supplemented the translators’ original English writings as data on language habits(the corpus was selected as above)to examine the translators’ style at both the lexical and syntactic levels.Our findings revealed that the two translators’ own language styles differed greatly on both lexical and syntactic structures,but there is a convergence of styles when translating the same text,with the two translators’ own linguistic styles almost completely offset in the translations,but still retained a little,thus the translator’s visibility has been proved.The translators’ own linguistic stylistic traits were more clearly retained in the Top-5 most frequent words,the 3-gram word combinations,4-gram syntactic-relation combinations and 6-gram part-of-speech combinations;As for the translator’s subjective attitude factor,this study firstly supplemented the data of the source text(the corrected Chinese-to-English machinetranslated text of The True Story of Ah Q)and the data of the translated texts(George Kin Leung’s,Chi-chen Wang’s,William A.Lyell’s and Julia Lovell’s translations of The True Story of Ah Q).Secondly,based on the framework of the Evaluation Theory,the study used automatic semantic annotation and a method of comparing the data and examples of the translated texts with the source text to represent the translators’ subjective attitudes more accurately,and to investigate the representation of translators’ subjectivity at three levels: attitude,engagement and graduation.The results of the study revealed that the translators in our case study manifested differently in terms of the subjective attitudes,reflecting the flexible,complex and variable nature of the translator’s subjectivity.Finally,we chose the differences in the lexical use of subjective attitude words between the translated texts and the original text as an alternative indicator for Model construction.The results of the quantitative analysis of the translator’s subjectivity provided us with indicators of syntactic complexity,style and subjective attitude words for the construction of our quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity.In the model construction part,we adopted a factor analysis method,after first reorganizing and filtering the alternative indicators,the results of the factor analysis showed that the translator’s subjectivity consisted of five main factors: the first main factor was highly correlated with the translator’s native language background;the second main factor mainly reflected the translator’s way of expressing his or her position or style,whether it was sentimental and communicative or logical and more distant;the third main factor mainly focused on the translator’s preference for syntactic relations and emotional attitudes;The fourth main factor focused on the use of probability words and words describing human personality traits,while the fifth main factor focused on the use of quantity and degree words.The results of the model tests still confirmed the validity of the model.Therefore,the quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity constructed in this study is relatively successful.The quantification idea and method also have strong replicability and application value,and can be extended to more research directions: for example,constructing a quantitative model of the translator’s subjectivity for different corpora;enhancing the translation quality for machine translation,and so on.However,this method also has certain limitations,as the scope of the texts and the translation process it covers are still not comprehensive,the quantitative model can only represent the translator’s subjectivity to a certain degree.Therefore,we believe that a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is needed to gain a more comprehensive and concrete understanding of translator’s subjectivity: quantitative methods can provide substantive and conclusive data support,while qualitative methods can provide concrete examples and cases to support.Finally,using a backward-looking approach to the results of the study,we have confirmed the validity of the broad definition of the translator’s subjectivity,starting from the cognitive process of translation,and found that the translator’s subjectivity was manifested in the translation process through the alternate or joint action of the translator’s conscious and subconscious,active and passive,acting throughout the translation process and producing different types of translation outputs due to different motivations.This study explored the embodied form of the translator’s subjectivity in Chinese to English translations of literary works from a quantification and modelling perspective,providing data support for theories related to the translator’s subjectivity and broadening the development of related issues,as well as having certain reference significance and application value for improving existing machine translation methods and enhancing the quality of machine translation.