Corpus-based Study Of The Translator’s Style Of Joel Martinsen

Since its begging in the 1990s,corpus-based translation study has been in a vigorous growth as more and more scholars adopt corpus-based or corpus-driven methods in translation studies.Developing from corpus linguistics and descriptive translation studies,the corpus-based translation studies also extends itself in many disciplines,of which the corpus-based study of translator’s style is one of the most important.Translator’s style can be defined as the translation methods and linguistic patterns that distinguish one translator’s works form others,as well as the "finger print" of the translator.The supernova era is the first sci-fi novel of Liu Cixin,the award winning Chinese sci-fi writer,and the dark forest is the second installment of the world renowned The Three Body trilogy.Irrespective of the attention paid to the trilogy and to Liu Cixin,few studies have favored TDF and TSE.Therefore,this thesis intends to adopt a corpus-based approach to study the translator’s style of these two books in joint hands of both quantitative and qualitative methods.The thesis builds a parallel corpus of the original and translated texts of TDF and TSE to investigate the translator’s style at lexical,syntactic and textual level.The self-built parallel corpus will also be compared to BNC and TEC and Crown-CLOB,a Brown family corpus.the thesis selects representative parameters to reveal the features,for instance,lexical density,mean sentence length and readability.As a result,these statistics do demonstrate some features of the translator’s style:the lexical diversity is high,the sentences are relatively longer due to the heavy use of subordinate clauses and the readability is close to that of Readers’Digest.The ensuing Chapter testifies previous results with the help of case analysis,and by the self-built parallel corpus of the translations of Ken Liu.The statistics from two self-built copora are put in comparison,from which the assumptions are supported by specific examples from the texts.Therefore,it is proven that Joel Martinsen does left his "thumb print" in his translation.The last Chapter summarizes the findings and limitations of the thesis.