Corpus-based Research On Translator’s Style Of Pi Pa Xing

Translation has always been for a long time treated as the activity of imitation which emphasizes the style of the writer,and the translator’s creativity is always neglected.Therefore,translator’s style has been paid less attention.With the rising of the descriptive translation studies,the importance of translator’s style is realized which not only decides the way of stating and explaining of the target–language text,but also reflects translator’s creativity.Therefore studies of translator’s style begin to attract attention of scholars gradually.With the rising of corpus linguistics,corpus-based translator’s style research comes into Scholar’s vision.Studies of translator’s style based on corpus have following advantages:Firstly,stylistic features of translation from macroscopic perspective can be clearly demonstrated.Secondly,the usage of certain vocabulary,sentence or punctuation can be presented microscopically.Meanwhile,all the research is based on the statistical data,which is helpful to describe the translator’s style scientifically and objectively.This thesis chooses four English versions of Pi Pa Xing which is translated by L.Cranmer—Byng,Witter Bynner,Xu Yuanchong and Yang Xianyi/Gladys Yang respectively as research object.English-Chinese Parallel Corpus based on the four English versions of Pi Pa Xing is built to study the four translator’s styles from the perspective of vocabulary,sentence and text.What’s more,the translator’s style is presented by listing example sentences.Meanwhile,English poems corpus is also built to work as comparison corpus which consists of sixty English poems and four English versions of Chang Hen Ge also function as comparison corpus.The author finds out that the tokens of all the four English versions of Pi Pa Xing exceed the original version.The lines of poetry in the versions of Bynner,Xu Yuanchong and Yang Xianyi/Gladys Yang stay the same with these of the original version,but Byng’s exceed the lines of the original one.Byng,Bynner and Xu Yuanchong prefer to use past sense in their text,but YangXianyi/Gladys Yang choose the present sense in most cases.The lexical density of Byng’s English version is highest,and the reading difficulty index of his text is the highest.The average line length is shortest.Byng likes to use the first and the third–person pronouns;The lexical density of Bynner’s English version is close to that of poems in the English poems corpus built by the author,and the average line length is the longest.Besides,the number of overt–cohesion words in Bynner’s version is the most,and the reading difficulty index of his s version is the lowest.He likes to choose the third-person pronoun.Xu Yuanchong emphasizes the lexical varieties and employs more verbs in his text than the other three translators;The reading difficulty index of his text is high;He often creates a situation and expresses the feeling when he translates the culture-loaded words.Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s average line length and lexical density are medium among the four English versions;The number of overt-cohesion words in their version is the least and they like to employ the first-person pronouns.The four translator’s styles reflected in Pi Pa Xing can also more or less be found in their translation of Chang Hen Ge.