A Corpus-based Study On Translator’s Style

During the past three decades,research in corpus-based translator’s style has developed rapidly and gained fruitful achievements in the field of corpus translation studies at home and abroad.Whereas,there are still some issues in research content and methodology that need to be further explored to provide insights for a more comprehensive research paradigm of corpus-based translator’s style in the future.Based on a self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus,this study adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare and analyze the formal,linguistic,and narrative characteristics of two Chinese versions,summarized the overall styles,and searched for the factors affecting the formation of styles.The self-built parallel corpus in this study contained the original of the English novel Of Mice and Men by the American writer John Steinbeck and two corresponding Chinese translations by mainland translator Qin Si and Taiwanese translator Chen Zongchen respectively.In terms of the research model,this study opted for a parallel comparison between different translations of the same original.Concerning research methodology,data were captured through quantitative analysis,on the strength of corpus tools,such as Word Smith,Ant Conc,CUC＿Paraconc,and statistical-related one LLX2.Distinctions in style between the two translators were summarized comprehensively and objectively via adopting qualitative analysis.Finally,the formation of individual style was discussed from the perspectives of translation purposes and social-cultural contexts.The finding is that both translators are featured with stable characteristics for their styles in their respective translations.First of all,from the perspective of formal parameters,Chen Zongchen’s version owns less lexical richness and hypotactic level,thus the overall text is prone to domestication,while Qin’s translation is consistent with the structure and expression of the original which adopts foreignization as a translation strategy.Secondly,from the perspective of linguistic parameters,compared with Qin Si,Chen Zongchen pays more attention to the concise expression of the translation,and mostly opts for four-character patterns.On the contrary,the frequency of using modal words at the end of sentences in Qin’s is much higher than that in Chen’s version,which indicates a clear manifestation of tone in the dialogue between the characters from the original.Finally,from the perspective of narrative parameters,the proportion of direct speech converted into free direct speech in Chen’s version is higher than that in Qin’s version,due to the majority of reporting clauses being deleted to make the narrative flow smooth without giving readers a sense of obstruction.However,Qin’s version mostly preserves the narrative structure of the original.Besides,Qin tends to translate the personal pronouns,possessive pronouns and nominal possessive pronouns in the original into personal pronouns in the Chinese version,while Chen Zongchen,in light of the target language’s expression habit,is prone to omitting them to achieve personal reference.And the results showed that the formation of the two overall styles is closely related to the translator’s sociocultural environment and translation purposes.This study is innovative in terms of research model,research methodology and research content,and provides ideas and means that can be drawn upon for a more scientific and comprehensive corpus-based translator style’s study.In addition,the discrepancies in translation styles between mainland and Taiwanese translators for foreign literary works also provide some insights for translation studies and sociocultural studies across the Strait.