A Corpus-based Stylistic Comparison Of The Old Man And The Sea And Its Six Chinese Translations

It is a universally acknowledged fact that Ernest Hemingway is acclaimed as a master of language,who occupies an important position in the history of American literature.In particular,his Nobel Prize winning masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea has enjoyed an ever-lasting popularity in China,including Taiwan and Hong Kong.An evidence of this popularity constitutes in the fact that more than 178 Chinese translations have come into being ever since Eileen Chang’s first such version in 1955.This study sets out to make a stylistic comparison of both the source text and its six representative and influential Chinese versions,i.e.,those of Eileen Chang,Hai Guan(1956),Yu Guangzhong(1957 & 2010),Wu Lao(1987)and Sun Zhili(2012)respectively.In the past two decades,significant advances have been made in the field of corpus-based studies of translator style.Despite a growing scholarly interest in the field,there seems to be some inadequacies,the most conspicuous of which is that most studies adopted the one-fold comparison method,thus making the research findings illusive and unverifiable.This study attempts to propose and design a corpus-based comprehensive or multidimensional research framework whereby the stylistic features of both the source text of The Old Man and the Sea and its six Chinese translations are investigated at the lexical,syntactical,textual as well as narratological levels.In terms of comparison method,the study has the following peculiarities.Firstly,in the present study,both S-type and T-type translator’s style are taken into consideration.To put it differently,the study not only concerns the style of the text(translation style),but also the style of the translator(translator style),adopting both inter-language and intra-language comparisons.Next,the study makes a descriptive and comparative investigation on both quantitative and qualitative terms.Then,by focusing on temporal and spatial contexts,it combines both horizontal synchronic and vertical diachronic comparisons.Additionally,the study employs a multilevel analysis both on macro level(word length,sentence length and vocabulary richness)and on micro level(personal pronouns,conjunctions and modal particles),in which research indicators are inter-subjectively verifiable.Besides,the study not only describes the unique features of different translations but also provides an analysis of the possible personal,temporal,or socio-cultural reasons or factors underlying the differences.Major findings of the research are as follows.Firstly,Eileen Chang’s translation shows an obvious preference for using simple and monosyllabic words,while it is relatively sparing in the use of modal particles.In addition,her translation overuses personal pronouns and conjunctions and there exist some stiff and unnatural expressions as well as mistranslations.Secondly,characteristic features unique to Hai Guan’s translation include his use of long sentences and modal particles.Besides,it exhibits an obvious tendency of explicitation and normalization,two of the so-called translation universals.Thirdly,in his two translations,Yu Guangzhong uses short and concise sentences and draws on a much wider range of vocabulary than the other translators do.However,there is only a slight difference between his first translation,published in Taiwan in 1957,and the new translation,published in mainland China nearly half a century later.What’s worse,Yu does not revise those mistranslations in his re-translation in 2010.Lastly,as for the two translations by Wu Lao and Sun Zhili,both translators exert great effort to reproduce the distinctive styles of the source text,and there are some similarities between the two versions both on lexical and sentential levels.However,Sun’s translation stands out for its precise modes of expression and for its fluency and idiomaticity of language use.