A Quantitative Stylistic Study On The Chinese Translations Of Woolf’s Stream-of-consciousness Novels

Stylistic studies on the translations of literary works are becoming a heated topic in corpus translation studies.Stream-of-consciousness(SOC)novels,as a typical type of literary work that focuses on depicting the characters’ mind flows,have also received attention.However,previous studies on the translations of Virginia Woolf’s representative works,Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,are mostly confined to discussions on the translation strategies and translation theories reflected in them.Few studies have combined the writing techniques of SOC novels to examine the stylistic features of their corresponding translations.Even fewer are based on corpus-based quantitative stylistic research.Since SOC novels primarily focus on the psychological activities of their characters,this thesis provides a new way of using psycholinguistic theory and relevant quantitative metrics to investigate the style of SOC novels and their Chinese translations.This study uses Virginia Woolf’s two representative works as examples and applies the LIWC textual analysis software to examine the following research questions:(1)Are there significant differences in the four Chinese translations of Woolf’s SOC novels from the perspective of LIWC metrics in linguistic and psychological dimension?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the four Chinese translations of Woolf’s SOC novels from the perspective of LIWC metrics in linguistic and psychological dimension?(3)What are the overall styles of these translations,compared with the styles of source texts of Woolf’s SOC novels?This thesis first selected Woolf’s two novels,Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,and their four Chinese translations to build complex parallel corpora of Woolf’s SOC novels composed of the following two sub-corpora:(1)English source text Mrs.Dalloway with two Chinese translations(Sun Liang and Su Mei’s translation and Gu Qinan’s translation);(2)English source text To the Lighthouse with two Chinese translations(Qu Shijing’s translation and Wang Jiaxiang’s translation).Next,the LIWC textual analysis tool was applied to calculate the LIWC scores of two novels and the four Chinese translations from linguistic and psychological dimensions.Further quantitative data from independent samples t-tests and qualitative analyses of examples from the corpora were combined to compare the two novels’ writing styles and to find the similarities and differences in the four Chinese translations.The results showed that(1)the writing styles of the two source texts were consistent in most LIWC metrics in linguistic dimension and psychological dimension;(2)while the four translations did not show significant differences in most LIWC metrics in linguistic dimension;there were some differences in some of LIWC metrics in psychological dimension among the four translations,such as greater language flexibility of Sun’s and Qu’s translations when translating characters’ interior monologue,and more words of affective processes and cognitive processes in Gu’s and Wang’s translations;(3)the overall styles of the four translations were convergent,that is,to be faithful to the styles of source texts and to show their individual stance.The qualitative analyses of the examples from the corpora further proved the reliability of these stylistic features revealed by quantitative metrics.This thesis confirmed the effectiveness of employing LIWC metrics in linguistic and psychological dimensions to study the styles of Woolf’s SOC novels and translations.It is helpful for readers to better understand the stylistic features of SOC novels and the corresponding Chinese translations,and it helps translators to manifest the styles of SOC novels in their translations more accurately.This thesis also provides more quantitative metrics for future stylistic studies of literary translations.