A Corpus-based Study Of The Translator's Style In Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

The research of the translator's style has always been based on impression and intuition to judge whether and how the original style is retained and transferred in the translation.This subjective,impressionistic and prescriptive approach has many deficiencies,such as an overemphasis on the match of the style between the translation and the original to the negligence of "the recurring linguistic habits",or in other words, the style of the translators in literary translation.With the development of Descriptive Translation Studies,a new methodology of corpus study has been introduced to the investigation of translators' style through large-scale linguistic data,which can effectively avoid such subjective judgment.This thesis sets out to make a corpus-based analysis on the styles of the translators of Hong Lou Meng——Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang and David Hawkes.On the basis of the specific research goal,further investigation will be conducted to analyze the recurring patterns of individual translator on lexical,syntactic and textual level.The study reveals that the two translators do show a consistent preference for using specific lexical items,syntactic patterns,and cohesive devices as manifested in the Yangs' and Hawkes' versions.Generally speaking,at the lexical level,Hawkes' version is characterized by lower TTR,shorter word length and higher proportion of fixed or semi-fixed lexical phrases than the Yangs' version,which demonstrate that Hawkes' version has an apparent tendency towards simplification.The Yangs' version,on the other hand,does not show such tendency.At the syntactic level,Hawkes' version is characterized by his use of longer sentences to interpret the source text,repeatedly drawing on optional syntactic constructions——optional that with reporting verbs say and tell and frequent use of personal references to achieve cohesiveness between sentences, the result of which is that Hawkes' version is more explicit.At the textual level,both Hawkes' and the Yangs' version manifest a tendency towards explicitation.However, Hawkes' version features a higher frequency of prepositional phrases than the Yangs', even in linguistic environment where there is no obvious justification for doing so.By contrast,the Yangs' tends to follow the ST structure closely and uses more conjunctions than prepositional phrases for this purpose.Finally,possible explanations of how the distinctive styles of individual translator are shaped will be given from the aspects of the two translators' native language cultures and translation norms,both of which contribute to shaping their distinctive styles in an unconscious way,in that the two translators draw on their linguistic habitus acquired in their native language cultures unconsciously and conform to or deviate from translation norms in a certain historical background consciously.